Flying the Nest

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Was just putting things back to normal in my front room, after the weekend's decorating, and found this, tucked in the corner of my son Jacob's degree, and thought I'd share it with you. It's that time of year again, when young adults all over the country are graduating, leaving the comparative safety of University life where they know that home is only a journey away ...

Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.
By Simon Armitage

Jacob tore this poem from a book and handed it to me when he graduated from University last year, and was about to leave home properly and stand on his own two feet.  I cried.

Love, Claire xxx