The actual title of the poem. This is Kennard’s derivation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which states that for two complementary variables, such as position and momentum, the more precisely one is known, the less precisely the other can be known.
When your son becomes a woman
(who still fancies women)
in a relationship with a gay man,
when she rejects the name
you carefully picked out
before he was born,
then her father grieves
for the son he’s lost,
struggles to love his daughter.
When you don’t know how
to talk about him (her?)
when she was a boy,
when you have to think
before everything you say,
have I got the pronouns right?
When she steps out in a skirt
rocking her purple heels
clutching a black purse,
then you feel her distress
as she bathes, bubbles
masking her body’s mistakes.
Then your stepmother asks,
do you think it’s a phase?
and you can’t know it isn’t.
When the same eyes
smile from the same face,
the same lips speak the same words,
then you realise she is your child—
here, moving forwards,
the unreduced constant.