Caroline Price
The Sisters
Miss Parker visits, armed with memories.
Up at the House Yram, Alocin and Theb
make daisy chains, play hopscotch
on the patio and bury sacrificial gifts
in flowerbeds, promising to resist
the adult world of Marty, Beth and Nicola:
they pledge fraternity with blots of blood
mixed stoically on Daddy’s headed paper
The old ladies nod, uncaring, staring
out across a cabaret of daffodils
On Saturdays in summer following the
lawnmower like seagulls round a plough,
calling and crying; and everybody knows
the girls are still on holiday -
or spring weekends, three leggy lambs
released into the meadow, running madly
through cow parsley and closed buttercups:
If you don’t get back before the call
for tea the fairies snatch you and change you …
The three old ladies nod, unhearing,
idly crushing petals of June roses
When do fairies leave? Miss Parker asks -
at what age? When one by one they go
to boarding school the House grows quiet
and in the long grass daisies flourish
where there was a lawn. It is the Girls House,
everybody says - they will come back.
Even the screen of conifers cannot conceal
the new estate pressed in the field
behind, red terraces not such congenial homes
for fairies as the holly wood had been.
Surrounded, palisaded, the big House retreats
into the ivy housecoat of premature age
The three old sisters nod, unseeing, hands
folded together like an autumn of dead leaves
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Page(s) 30
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