Marion Ashton
Aunt Et
So many soldiers in your album,
with cheerful faces defying their eye-patches,
and trouser legs neatly pinned back at the thigh,
lined up in wicker beds and bath-chairs,
taking the sun on the veranda.
Turning the heavy pages with their framed inlays
I look for you and Lily, always close together,
amongst the groups of nurses, posing in starched aprons,
collars and cuffs, like white-veiled nuns.
The central picture reveals the two of you as a couple,
arms tightly wrapped around each other,
the message signed boldly in swirling letters –
‘To my Ettie – Always yours, Lily’.
Your dark eyes shine out defiantly between curtains of black hair.
I remember you as the aunt who was always different
and didn’t care (with skeletons in her cupboard
mum said, and I wondered where),
your hair a Harpo Marx shock of white,
topped by a black beret, tipped forever out of kilter,
your hearing-aid whistling its own strange music.
Page(s) 39
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The