Abscission
A girl on the dune-brow, staring
Beyond a sea jumping with stars:
Sixteen, In a pupa of terror,
She feels herself dead,
From the mind the life bled out.
Questions whizz through the air:
No point in answering.
Her friend shouts ‘Race you to the village.’
She follows, propelling her own husk,
Then swings about without a word,
Stumbles over the pus hummocks.
Yesterday they went in to town.
An oddness happened in the cinema;
The floor became a quagmire,
Taking her mind with it.
She muttered, ‘It is all dissolving,
I have gone away.’
They stuck her head between her knees,
Laughed and trundled her off.
‘I am someone else,
Or, rather, no-one at all.
Do you tell me nothing, explain nothing?’
Her feet seemed to be saying:
We have come so far. It is over.
Outstretched in a grave of sand,
Eyes dead eggs, heart in a freeze,
The days slither into the scoop of night.
One day she wakens, feverish:
Normality of a cold!
Approval, cosseting.
What did it all mean, that huge nullity?
The fire of a chill hell has licked her,
Warning that its sullen, secret smokes
Will never rise, will finally own her.
But now eyes, voices, waves snap on,
Electrifying love-flood bright as blood.
She laughs, pulls a dagger of grass:
It lets the sun’s sizzle through,
Turns to gold.
Page(s) 26-27
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