Carole Bromley
Fiftieth Birthday
1948. Year of The White Goddess I say
but they don’t listen. They are plotting.
They will hang a sheet across the house
and I will have to pretend not to mind.
Of course I don’t remember it much.
I take down a book of old photographs.
Pale women, who would have traded their souls
for an orange, stand in queues for sugar.
Soon they would consign khaki to mothballs,
bin the medals everybody got and wave off
demobbed heroes in steel-rimmed specs
to safe jobs behind heavy wooden counters
weighing out lozenges. Only the desert sand
would cling to the square box-Brownie shots
of belching camels and veiled dark-eyed women
that yellowed in rusty tins in garden sheds.
I have no time to reflect on Graves
or the year I was born. Outside
I can already hear muffled laughter
and someone passes the window with a ladder.
Page(s) 55
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