Living Next Door to the City
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About this ebook
This captivating collection of poems is your invitation to take a journey of profound self-reflection and understanding. With deeply moving insights into the depths of love and life, this book will help you to reconnect with your emotions and discover a newfound understanding of yourself. Reading this book will:
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Book preview
Living Next Door to the City - Elaine Eveleigh
BROKEN
A herring gull with a broken wing
a stubborn sinew still secures
drags it over the arranged stones.
Moving with difficulty, an old woman
with too much shopping,
she can’t manage, can’t abandon.
Such an encumbrance
but he’s going to be lost without it.
On the beach he finds his sea legs.
Almost struts towards the shore
gull gait more faithful than feathers.
Trying to ignore the lopsidedness,
an old trooper coming on to sing
as though, looks and voice and fans
hadn’t deserted him. Yesterday’s mates
fly up above, secure in wings efficiency.
Looking down, but not at him,
complex eye, cherry picking tide’s bounty.
So at home up there, so familiar,
model bird shapes white on blue.
Saying summer on our photographs.
So many good fairies at their christening,
their birthright to inherit, land, sea, and sky.
Follow the boat, the plough and street party.
The disabled seagull pecks at sand.
How long before his body lies
swollen in waves swell?
Life’s a beach and then….
A VIEW FROM CHILDHOOD
It looked like bravado
That confidence made of skill and experience.
Snipping through silk, independent
of draughts or scissors approach.
A life of its own.
Expensive wool coating reduced to a cut out toy.
Turquoise brocade brought back from Thailand.
‘You could have got the same thing
in Brights last year,’ sniffs my mother.
But she is only the seamstress.
The little woman up the hill,
the cutter and shaper, eventual creator.
Who is she to destroy illusions. Exclusive
to them, this bolt from the blue.
Long haul holiday justified.
Awkward women who want to look
like the slim Siamese girls.
Faults of middle age and sturdy genetics
forgiven, hidden, with bias and folds.
‘A bit down on the shoulder’
‘A bit up on the sides’
Magazines make promises
Real bodies decide.
Eager as the young brides
Figures hugged in white, obvious as X rays, or teenagers pruning their jeans,
all in at the seams. School dresses
for me and my sister. Mine yellow check, hers, square necked, plain green.
The pedestrian needs of trousers with failed zips, pockets that leaked money and secrets
when clothes were made and mended
not sharing a trolley with groceries in Sainsbury’s picked over in aid of Oxfam and Hospices.
Keyed in at any old time.
Always the sewing machine, vibrating, making sense of material dreams
Till all satisfied, paraded,
the catwalk of our cold front room.
CUT FLOWERS
The magenta anemones
are dying, they’re doing it in style.
Stems twisting towards the light,
petals stretched as if, cosmetic surgery
had been involved.
‘Don’t give in to time, call,
Flora Solutions 212415.’
No longer obedient, who sprang up so eagerly,
attention seeking teenagers displaying all their wares.
Now grope in arthritic trauma
or flabbier stem discovers
its bend is permanent, leans
awkwardly on fellow flower, sags,
against the rim of the vase
needing so much support.
The leaves have forgotten their greenness.
The natural curliness of youth
crimped into senility, anticipate,
the slow compost.
As for the dark centres,
their coquetry turns to desperation
sprinkling black dust onto table’s litter,
their disaffection contagious as a sneeze.
This is the death bed scene,
petals darken at the edges
thin out like teeth in diseased gums.
Draw in on themselves, lose
interest in those with whom they
shared same stamen. Till,
the first one falls, staining the carpet.
Alarming as blood.
BIBURY CHURCHYARD
Sometimes on a summer afternoon
Pub lunch eaten. Beauty spot’s
claim to fame exploited.
The Abbey shop and museum already