We once watched a crowd
pull a drowned child from the lake.
Blue-lipped and dressed in water's long green silk
she lay for dead.
Then kneeling on the earth
, a heroine, her red head bowed,
her wartime cotton frock soaked,
my mother gave a stranger's child her breath.
The crowd stood silent,
drawn by the dread of it.
The child breathed, bleating
and rosy in my mother's hands.
My father took her home to a poor house
and watched her thrashed for almost drowning.
Was I there?
Or is that troubled surface something else
shadowy under the dipped fingers of willows
where satiny mud blooms in cloudiness
after the treading, heavy webs of swan
s as their wings beat and whistle on the air?
All lost things lie under closing water
in that lake with the poor man's daughter.
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The poem is a true story, or "as true as I and my memory can make it". (Clarke was a young girl when the main event happened, perhaps the same age as the child in the poem.) It is about a girl who nearly drowned in a lake and was given the kiss of life by Clarke's mother. When the child was taken back to her 'poor house', she was 'thrashed for almost drowning'.
This frightening memory leads the poet to question the ability of our memories to retell the truth - she wonders about other influences that could cloud the precision of our memories.
