after Sheila Rowbotham

The heaping housework was a slow moraine
that gathered ground and chewed up just in time
into too late for anything but blame
and coexistence with your firm decline.
Grubby light at bay in corners, the fray
of things, and you, poised in the confusion
you allowed and added to, a display
of I’d thought absence, then later fixed on
bewilderment at us your circumstance.
Now though the world clarifies. To exact
labour and deny pay! What women know,
your settled fury, more than just grievance
was consciousness that this domestic crap
was History’s long scam, an uphill flow
of value, wrong as water’s.
Your stillness was a stand. At last I see
its dirty protest, ideology
refusing quarter,
the piles a barricade, us kids amazed,
the fuck you couldn’t give, the fuck you gave.