Before you were mine

• Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.
• I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics.
• Wrong pavement
• Right walk home
• Sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine
• Whose small bites on your neck sweatheart?
• The thought of me doesn’t occur
• ‘movie’ ‘lights‘ ‘ballrooom’ - semantic field
• Regular stanzas - for equal stanzas of five lines symbolic of how past cannot be altered; the past is strong and rigid and cannot change. Also, mother is now a restricted housewife - liberty and freedom taken like many women in 50s
• Assonance if ’ee’ phonology of laughter in first stanza - not in other stanzas shows her birth stopped mothers happiness.