Rebecca Goss - The Certificates (United Kingdom)

from #BreakTheBias by Various

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about

Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth, (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013) was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature

Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018. Rebecca’s third full-length collection, Girl, was published with Carcanet/Northern House in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019.

Twitter: twitter.com/gosspoems
Instagram: www.instagram.com/gosspoems/?hl=en

lyrics

THE CERTIFICATES

Mothers were not given space to write their occupations on UK birth certificates until 1984. Source: General Register Office

The registrar takes his pen, tips its freight
of permanent ink to write Poet in the space
that did not exist beside my mother’s name,

or my grandmother’s name. Those bloody,
sweat-drenched women sent back to hearth
and cradle, their skills cancelled, never known.

My mother had four children in a decade,
each certificate proving nothing but birth.
My lineage? Patriarchal: father/farmer,

father/journalist, a family’s passage from land
to desk, but my mother’s story of travel,
of being photographed, of earning in a day

what my father brought home in a week
was hushed. I watch the registrar write,
as my baby daughter cries at my chest,

and I’m thankful for her ringing lungs, this
primary deed, this sure beginning of her archive.

credits

from #BreakTheBias, released March 8, 2022
CREDITS:
'The Certificates' is taken from the collection Girl (Carcanet, 2019)
Purchase the collection at:
www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784107239