Live love laugh…. the Hankinson way.. Family, Education, Health, Humour, Resilience, compassion.
Once upon a heartbeat
Your small hand held on to mine
Once upon a full moon
When the midnight stars did shine.
Once upon a heartbeat
My child I gave to you,
Everything my heart held dearly
My dreams and wishes too.
Once upon a heartbeat
You walked with head held high
You were brave enough to stand up tall
Your wings were strong enough to fly.
Once upon a heartbeat
I watched you stride away
Grown up, confident and brave
To make it your own way.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
for d’Verse.
For Ellen.
He slayed the dragon, the sun shone he wiped the blood from the sword and went on his way.
For her that wasn’t the end of the story though.
She cooked him fried eggs for breakfast, ironed his shirts, darned his socks, plumped his pillows and waited for the debt to be done.
Paid in full – but it never was. She began to wish she had eloped with the dragon or that at the very least the dragon’s breath had scared away her knight in shining armour.
She began to wish she had reclaimed the night without her knight.
She began to wonder what dragon children would have looked like.
Perhaps she already knew-with their curly locks and their churlish charm and the devil may care attitude they had clearly inherited from their father not to mention their charming eyes of blue.
And all he had had to do – was slay the dragon.
©Alison Jean Hankinson
Footfalls through the frost
Whispers on the wind,
Stillness in the stars,
Grubby chubby little hands
Seeking out shells on the shoreline.
Moments of magic in motherhood.
Memories fall like raindrops from the skies
Teardrops in my eyes
as I cherish every second of your lives.
©Alison Jean Hankinson
Love you always wherever you may be-Mumma.
I think I have been silent for quite a while and now it is time to break the silence. I realise that so much of what I am and what I have done with my life and what I have become is linked to becoming a mother.
For me there was never any doubt that it was a fundamental part of what I held as important-not excelling in a sport or becoming a great leader or even the top of my career but giving and nurturing as best I could new members of the human race. I didn’t always do the job well, but I mostly did my best with the time and resources that I had at my disposal at the time.
I was always clear in my own mind that each would become their own person and make their own way in life and that in some respects all that I was doing was giving them some tools for their life basket and a safe place to grow. So it was a sprinkling of knowledge, a touch of high spiritedness, add in resilience backbone and compassion for others. I always wanted them to fly the nest and soar in the winds in their own little worlds build their own castles in the air and thrive and survive and have soul.
They have moved into their own lives now, almost effortlessly without a backwards glance and yet I know that they will always be connected. I don’t think the umbilical cord is ever truly broken and just as I will always carry my own mother in my heart even though she is long since gone I think they too will always carry a part of me in their hearts and so the story goes, the ebb and flow, mother to child.
Withered
Her hand frail against the withered fronds as she rearranged the flowers
For time had sold them short.
Joyful
Her youthful stance and gaze, as glorious bride in the gaily painted photo-frame
Captured in the stillness of time framed by the care-home mantle-piece.
Anguish
Forgetting fettered fragile moments of family-time,
Lost forever in the timelessness of a fretful mind.
Peacefulness
Her pain receding as the hands of time hold her soul
Serene against the backdrop of a moonlit sky.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
This for poetics at d’verse. We were asked to explore something we couldn’t touch. It is coming up for the 10th anniversary of my mum passing away and she never got to be old so she never experienced losing her memories.
Still silent seamless sorrow as the shadows of the day recede
My loss and longing washes over me
And it feels like my heart might bleed.
To carry both of you with me across the seas of need
I long to have your hands to hold
And from this endless ache be freed.
Love sets us free to chase our dreams
Make no mistaking there
But the hollow place inside of me, still wishes you were here.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
For Mental Health Awareness Week 2018.
For my girls. Whom I love, every day and more. For my Ellen across the seas. Some days leave a gaping chasm of loss. Hold your children tight when they are small if you are going to give them wings to fly. XXXXX
I am sharing this for open link night on d’Verse and of course the hand holding is part of the theme. For my beautiful girls. XXXX
We are Phoenix we rise above
we fly high against the backdrop
Of a twilight sky
And leave you dead and cold.
Let your sallow soul grow old amongst the bones of those who told
The shallow lie you heard amongst my teardrops.
Crystal clear
No malice here
I grace the air with wings of gold.
My heart unfolds with truth and beauty, pure love and loyalty
I am Phoenix.
I rise above.
©Alison Jean Hankinson.
Image creative commons free to use from pixabay.
This is again for mental health awareness week. I spent some time today at the archives in Preston. I am currently participating in a local history/arts/creative writing/mental health project. It is based around the Whittingham Asylum at Preston and it aims to give a voice to the lives and stories that played out there. It was a very large Asylum and Preston was very proud of it, there were about 500 staff and often as many as 3000 inpatients.
I have learned a lot in such a few sessions and certainly had some of my own assumptions challenged. The Asylum opened in 1873 and had patients sent there from all over the north-west of England, many of the other Asylums, workhouses, almshouses were already bursting at the seams. It was regarded as a model Asylum and postcards of its external facade were sold as memorabilia. There were extensive gardens where fruit and vegetables were grown and it even had its own orchestra. Underneath this facade still lurked the very real horrors of Victorian poverty and the mental health of a scarred nation. End-stage syphilis was one of the significant causes of the mental and psychotic decline that resulted in many people spending their end of days in the Asylum and in the period of World War 1, both shell-shock and a form of hydrocephalus resulting from the Spanish flu were responsible for increased demand for spaces and places within the Asylum. The superintendent’s journal from 1873-95 was stark to begin with detailing the very worst events including the frequent dismissals of staff for what can only be described as physical abuse of the inpatients and the frequent outbreaks of scarlatina, diarrhoea and typhoid, whilst rules and regulations resulted in greater detail in later entries, including the deaths from misadventure, poor health and at their own hand.
The Asylum had its own cemetery. People came and went though, it wasn’t always the end of the road and when the photographer that came to capture the newly admitted, those well enough would ask to have images taken to show they were well and recovered to send to their loved ones with the plea to come and take them away.
Today we were considering restraint, emotional, physical and chemical.
I wrote this for Charlotte.
In Chains
Into the light, beyond the bands that bind me tight,
Into the dawn, beneath the hands that hold me down,
Into the sunlight, the stench of starch and sulphur stings my eyes
Into the madness, my muddled mind festers in fetid fettered manacles.
Deliver me.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
