Ida smiles

Wahida takes my son in her arms, and she cradles him
when he cries. She bakes him Yemeni flatbreads
and sabayah. She watches him as he plays; she croons

softly when he frets or he fidgets; she follows
the flow of his daydreams.
                                                 He calls her Ida:
she smiles, and when she smiles, the crinkling

seams of her skin are the ochre dunes and ridges
of the limitless sands; the kohl outlines
of the wadis traced through the sere highlands.

*******

Wahida smiles, and when she smiles, 
her onyx eyes are two sun-sparked stones
twinkling beneath clear turquoise skies. 

This is a song of love and gratitude for my son’s childminder - and for my son as well! I wrote this during the pandemic, so it was a long time after Wahida ended her work with my son, but then she greeted me one day as I was walking through our local park and this poem came to me. I got in touch with her to ask her permission to publish it and she was very gracious about this!

I have never been to Yemen, I am sad to say, but I feel that something of that land is deeply part of my son’s life and that the figure of Wahida was a very important and formative attachment for him.

This poem was first published by the Atrium webzine on 8 May 2025 - big thanks to their editors Holly Magill and Claire Walker. The photograph of my son when he was little (but still cradle-able at a pinch!) is deliberately a discreet one, actually taken not at Wahida’s house, but in my cousin Sarah’s old house in Portsmouth.