Pat Marum
The Insect Parlour
Second Light Poetry Competition 2008 COMMENDED
She would watch
exquisite damsel-flies air-skate
the lake, the wide arcs of dragon-flies,
lingeringly
think of the room a moon-fall
on water. Others played on the lawn, lay in the sun.
But she found the parlour
glass jars and cockroaches immersed
in cool liquid, in cupboards
close to lace curtains trays of fritillaries
caught and logged by her great-great-uncle,
his drawings of large blues, field-notes
on the elimination of mosquitoes.
She saw, her mind dazzled,
pungent mud-flats where women brushed midges
from their long skirts and birds streamed
dispersed by a shot, the pedlar pushing his cart
past the cave’s sibylline mouth, the Chinese
magician who watched the subtle sky in the door,
elliptical glasswork, spirals of smoke
embracing the girders
and station gates, the warmed petals
of the rose. She knew there were pupae
in the woods, shivered as through the window
she saw the young men on the grass,
their unseen wings,
their white shirts shimmering in the dusk.
Previously published in Smoke, Issue 54.
Competition judged by Gillian Clarke
Page(s) 17
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