This is the first of Lorna Goodison’s poems on her relation with poetry, and it is also the first of her second collection, I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986).

The contradiction between the poem’s title and its actual position in the text makes clear that this is the last “something” before something new begins, which is particularly significant because the collection considered as a whole expresses a philosophy of life in which the idea of “becoming” and the figure of the “mother” are essential elements.

The word becoming suggests the possibility of regeneration and rebirth, the eternal flow of the life cycle, while the word mother has to be understood in a much broader sense than we may be used to—as the root not merely of our individual lives (one’s personal mother), but also of the whole history that preceded us (a precedent matrix, or universal mother). I Am Becoming My Mother expresses the discovery of being part of a whole, celebrates the poet’s deep understanding of primal life, and gives voice to other women.

“My Last Poem” opens with a description of the process of writing poetry, where poems spontaneously come to the surface, delivering themselves to the poet, who takes pride in “making them shine.” But this one is somewhat different, because the poet needs it to feed her child during a cold winter marking her father’s slow death.

Here, poetry replaces food and becomes the means through which the mother fulfills her nurturing function. Since mothering is seen as the ultimate function of a woman, this is the poet’s “last” poem because she has lived several lives, as a “daughter, sister, mistress, friend, warrior / wife,” and this last poem should be “a high holy ending for the blessed / one / me as mother to a man.”

But later the poet admits that this one may not in fact be her last poem and that she will “keep the word love” to write other poems. The “last poem” stands, therefore, for the last life, the life as a mother, but it communicates also the beginning of something that has love at its center: the experience of motherhood in the broader sense discussed above.

In this way the poem acts as an overture for the collection, anticipating the process of all the other poems to come.

Categories: British Literature, Caribbean Literature, Literature

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