Gap Year by Jackie Kay

"Gap Year" by Jackie Kay.

Here is the WONDERFUL site offered by BBC Bitesize, which talks you through the various stages of the poem.

As the BBC site explains: This poem describes Jackie Kay’s feelings for her son Matthew as he is travelling on his gap year. She remains at home wondering what he is doing, reminiscing about his childhood and reflecting on how quickly he has grown up.

Here is an annotated version of the poem, Gap Year. 

Gap Year

(for Mateo)

I
I remember your Moses basket before you were born.
I’d stare at the fleecy white sheet for days, weeks,
willing you to arrive, hardly able to believe
I would ever have a real baby to put in the basket.

I’d feel the mound of my tight tub of a stomach,
and you moving there, foot against my heart,
elbow in my ribcage, turning, burping, awake, asleep.
One time I imagined I felt you laugh.

I’d play you Handel’s Water Music or Emma Kirkby
singing Pergolesi. I’d talk to you, my close stranger,
call you Tumshie, ask when you were coming to meet me.
You arrived late, the very hot summer of eighty-eight.

You had passed the due date string of eights,
and were pulled out with forceps, blue, floury,
on the fourteenth of August on Sunday afternoon.
I took you home on Monday and lay you in your basket.

II
Now, I peek in your room and stare at your bed
hardly able to imagine you back in there sleeping,
Your handsome face – soft, open. Now you are eighteen,
six foot two, away, away in Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia.

I follow your trails on my Times Atlas:
from the Caribbean side of Costa Rica to the Pacific,
the baby turtles to the massive leatherbacks.
Then on to Lima, to Cuzco. Your grandfather

rings: ‘Have you considered altitude sickness,
Christ, he’s sixteen thousand feet above sea level.’
Then to the lost city of the Incas, Macchu Picchu,
Where you take a photograph of yourself with the statue

of the original Tupac. You are wearing a Peruvian hat.
Yesterday in Puno before catching the bus for Copacabana,
you suddenly appear on a webcam and blow me a kiss,
you have a new haircut; your face is grainy, blurry.

Seeing you, shy, smiling, on the webcam reminds me
of the second scan at twenty weeks, how at that fuzzy
moment back then, you were lying cross-legged with
an index finger resting sophisticatedly on one cheek.

You started the Inca trail in Arctic conditions
and ended up in subtropical. Now you plan the Amazon
in Bolivia. Your grandfather rings again to say
‘There’s three warring factions in Bolivia, warn him

against it. He canny see everything. Tell him to come home.’
But you say all the travellers you meet rave about Bolivia. You want
to see the Salar de Uyuni,
the world’s largest salt-flats, the Amazonian rainforest.

And now you are not coming home till four weeks after
your due date. After Bolivia, you plan to stay
with a friend’s Auntie in Argentina.
Then – to Chile where you’ll stay with friends of Diane’s.

And maybe work for the Victor Jara Foundation.
I feel like a home-alone mother; all the lights
have gone out in the hall, and now I am
wearing your large black slippers, flip-flopping

into your empty bedroom, trying to imagine you
in your bed. I stare at the photos you send by messenger:
you on the top of the world, arms outstretched, eager.
Blue sky, white snow; you by Lake Tararhua, beaming.

My heart soars like the birds in your bright blue skies.
My love glows like the sunrise over the lost city.
I sing along to Ella Fitzgerald, A tisket A tasket.
I have a son out in the big wide world.

A flip and a skip ago, you were dreaming in your basket.

Jackie Kay

From Jackie Kay, Darling: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007)

Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.


NB:

Jackie Kay said this about her poem:

t. Do you want to say anything about why you wrote this poem? I'm reaching for hankie immediately. 

JK: Gap Year is really what it says on the tin. My son went on a Gap Year, but it made me really think about seeing his face, and I supposed what sparked the poem off is saying his face on the webcam, and it was all fuzzy and it made me remember or think about the face that I saw on the scan, on a fuzzy screen as well. And it made me think of simultaneous time and how your memory works. Your memory's not linear; things can happen years apart and yet be exactly together. So I was really fascinated in that, in their being a gap of time. But also in there being no gap at all of time. And also of him being six foot two and things being reversed. And he said to me mum, if I stand at my full height and give you a hug, I feel like I'm consoling a small child. And so I was thinking of how things get turned around and things get quickly reversed in life. So that's another kind of gap. JF: Great, so thank you

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