Summer With You

Slamming the yellow door, I think that is the end
My mother shouts that I’m ruining my life
I throw off the shoes you bought me for your dances
Burn the dress bloodied red after your whiskey disappeared

Most days the bed sighs unmade and the smashed dishes unfixed
You kept building sandcastles at the kitchen table
I open the windows and let the sand blow everywhere
You nail them shut and I run out the back door again

Some days I dream about swimming out to sea
Us mermaids sit on clamshells and comb our hair when we please
When the sailors come we dive under the water
And kick hard with our tails

Why don’t you go dancing again, my mother urges
You’ll soon see he’s the perfect gentleman
That hat he gave you was just lovely, duck
but I keep thinking about the dead birds in the box
and the bloodied feathers used to make it.

I bring you a nice cup of tea in bed
The sand has settled to the bottom and you ignore the clamshells in spaghetti
The broken glass on the shore cuts my feet still
And I’ve run out of cream for the sunburn

You go on about the beautiful weather we’re having
and I want to throw plates at you still
but I smile at the baby
and try to forget the summer I met you.

During the last week of term I was tasked with teaching a poem for 10 Literature, which ended up good fun. I do miss the creativity of teaching and digging into a text - most times emergency teaching is just glorified babysitting.

It was a blank verse poem by a guy called Roger McGough, set in the 1950's. It tracks a relationship from the honeymoon summer of love and the passion of the marital bed where the outside world fades away to jealous recriminations and the brutal domestic violence that attempts to control his wife, who he imagines quite the whore - whether she is or not. In one awful scene she sits passively and silently and he finally begrudgingly admits he is sorry for hitting her. In the end the shock of the poem for me was the fact they settle into a comfortable domestic arrangement - with a baby - with him still dreaming of this utopian summer of love. At no point is her voice present - she has very little autonomy due to the time in which she was living, when woman simply 'made do' and not leave a marriage despite how unhappy she might be. At one point she leaves him and he can only imagine her watching. telly at her mothers, as she has no imaginative life of her own, no dreams of her own.

The students were given a choice of doing a visual representation that captured mood and atmosphere, an analysis which explored the techniques of the poem, or a rewrite of key scenes or added scenes from Monica's perspective. I'm a big believer in giving students choice - it was up to them to play with the edges of the poem. Of course I can't share them with you here, as I don't have their permission, but I did enjoy creating my own creative response to the poem where I give Monica an imaginative life of her own.

I imagine her mother convincing her to go back to him despite her reluctance, and her dreams of independence free from not only him but all men. There's a few lines in the poem where they let birds die in a box because they're too in love and obsessed with each other to feed them, foreshadowing the later brutality. These are transformed into a hat he gifts her, where the mother sees kindness and the daughter is only reminded of her sacrifice, lost freedoms, and violence in the marital bed. I didn't want the poem to end with this easy comfort and resignation, but her resentment and the pain of being trapped in a marriage with a man she doesn't love. There's many images in my response that are plucked from the poem and looked at from a different angle - the dancing, the yellow door, the whiskey, the red dress, the broken crockery, the sea shore, the weather, the summer of their honeymoon.

I can't find the long copy of the poem online but there's an audio version set to guitar which you can listen to on youtube here. Here's my 'reading' of the poem and a creative addition by the subject, Monica.

Hope you enjoyed it. Riffing off the creative works of others can be a whole lot of fun and a great way to get to the heart of a piece - it's characters and values in particular.