An Undistinguished Biography

I read in 1846 the Choctaw Nation
sent $273 to another small nation, Ireland,
when the potato crop failed; people dying
on the docks, arms outstretched.

I try to not to skip the antecedents
at the beginning of a memoir, so and so
married someone beneath them,
wore a tall hat and whiskers, made treaties
and ruled India; it’s strange how people turn out.

Oh, you Choctaws, I don’t know you,
we didn’t do you at school. I wish
you had appeared earlier, your footprints
on the wet lawn; a movement beyond the yew hedge;
the far side of the hockey field.

Now, through the grey evening
do I start to see you? Palms held out, unsmiling,
eyes speaking to an unseen horizon.
smelling grief in a bird
with three green wings.

Ruth Hobson was born in Nottingham in 1951, where she still lives, works, and writes. She has been published for over thirty years by literary magazines and journals including Ambit, Magma, London Magazine, The Wide Skirt, Poetry London, Theology Journal, and The Delinquent, and more recently by The International Times (IT), The Fig Tree, and the New Nottingham Review. Ruth has facilitated countless poetry workshops in prisons and for students with disabilities, and co-authored (as Ruth Shelton) Making Nothing Happen—5 Poets explore Faith and Spirituality (Ashgate, London, 2014). Her first poetry collection Arthur Talks was published in 2019 by Palewell Press. Palewell Press also published her Christmas poetry pamphlet Starwise in 2023. Her poem ‘Brigid’ won the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition in 2024.