May Day by Jackie Kay
I should start with a warning—Jackie Kay’s latest poetry collection May Day made me cry, twice, on the bus. It’s central theme is Kay’s parents, the love they all had for each other, and their political lives.
Kay’s parents were, like Kay, socialists committed to fighting for race, gender and sexual liberation. But there is so much other love here too. There is love for her son, whom she misses during the Covid lockdown:
I am missing my wise, considerate Matt.
Now we FaceTime or house party
with a can of Guinness, a glass of wine,
doing our best, cheerzing the screen.
…Love is keeping our distance. Love is a long-distance dance.
There is love for friends:
Now who are we, my dear friend,
what are we without our mothers?
…walking grief’s long corridor
to the open window, the open door.
In A Banquet for the Boys she thanks and celebrates her ”trans-affirming bros” with a vegan feast, “For keeping your head, boys, for knowing what matters.” She celebrates the freedom of equal marriage for lesbian and gay couples:
The guid day when me and my bonnie lassie
might walk doon the aisle and be free.
Beyond her immediate circle this collection has a cast of thousands. This includes people from the labour, peace and anti-racist movements who Kay has met over many decades. There were names I knew such as Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes and Peggy Seeger.
And there were many I met for the first time, such as Scottish suffragette, doctor and champion of medical education for women Elsie Inglis.
In 1960 Paul Robeson came to lead the May Day parade in Glasgow. Key recalls When Paul Robeson Came Back to Glasgow and how “it seemed the whole o’ Glesca Toon opened its arms to the man.”
These figures appear in memory and story form. There is a stunning and intimate recollection of Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s, 1983. The singer responds to Jackie making a request:
Then SNAP! She remembers “Sugar in My Bowl” suddenly.
She points her long finger at me, still pointing forty years later,
I need a little sugar in my bowl
maybe I can fix things up so
they’ll go…
One of themes of this collection is racism and the fight against it. A standout poem, Flag Up Scotland, Jamaica, was commissioned by Glasgow University to mark their historic report Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow and its memorandum of understanding with the University of the West Indies. In the poem, Kay casts an unflinching eye on the horror of the Transatlantic slave trade:
Here’s the theft that grew and grew.
Here’s the debt that’s overdue.
…Here’s the sun that strikes the gold.
Here’s the ship with lethal hold.
Kay sees the actions of the University of Glasgow in a positive light:
Here’s the hand that starts amends.
Here’s Jamaica, Glasgow – friends.
…Here’s the redress, long been owed.
Here’s the first step on the road.
The other stand out poems were the ones about Kay’s mum and dad, the ends of their lives, their deaths and her life afterwards. They resonated with me long after I closed the book. They are exquisitely and painfully vulnerable and suffused with affection. In Around the Round Table she writes:
And your beds are now empty
but your house is full of song.
…When the moon rises over Brackenbrae, I sit at the empty table
looking out into the night and hear Dad singing Ella.
In My Mum is a Robin she imagines her mum as a variety of birds:
Sometimes, close, she finds a branch
and perches her soft little feet.
…till I look up…
And say out loud in case she can hear me,
Is that you, Mum? I miss thee. I miss thee.”
There is fear for the future in this collection:
What can I say but flame the alarm
before our world goes up in shame
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY.
In the end though, Jackie Kay writes of, and with, hope, for the planet, for people, for the struggle—and urges us to “relish this love that goes on and on and on.”
