Poetry

• She


  • On the second floor of a tenement
  • From her front room window you see the cemetery
• Her bedroom


  • Newspapers dating back to the War covering every present she's ever got since the War
  • Endless tablecloths, napkins, perfume, bath salts
  • Stories of things I can't understand, words like conscientious objector
  • Climb over all the newspaper parcels to get to bed
• When she gets the letter


  She is hopping mad
• The new house


  • Called a high rise
  • I play in the lift all the way up to 24
  • Once I get stuck for a whole hour
• From her window


  • You see noisy kids playing hopscotch or home
• She


  • Makes endless pots of vegetable soup, a bit bit of hoch floating inside like a fish
  • Likes the hot running water in her own bathroom, the wall-to-wall foam-backed carpet, the parcels locked in her air-raid shelter
  • Doesn't settle down, even at 70 she cleans people's houses for ten bob and goes to church on Sundays, dragging me along
• My parents do not believe


  It is down to her
• By the time I am seven


  • We are almost the same height
  • She still walks faster, rushing me down the High Street till we get to her cleaning house
  • The hall is huge, rooms lead off like an octopus's arms
• The woman


  • The posh one all smiles that make goosepimples run up my arms
• Café au lait


  Café oh what?
• She


  • On the ground floor of a high rise
  • From her living-room you see ambulances, screaming their way to the Royal Infirmary