Gavin Ewart
Sonnet: Be Gentle With Me!
This is the conventional cry of virgins in rather
soupy love stories which stop short on the edge of
being sexually explicit. Like the warning cry of a bird
it’s meant to halt the rampaging incoming cock,
not pausing to take its bowler hat off in the hall -
“rushing the vestibule” as one might say, so heated
it behaves like a squad of detectives battering in
the passive and unsuspecting door of a suspect.
So far, so good; and, in all loving, gentleness is right.
But this is a cry the cock itself might raise -
most girls in Britain handle it very clumsily,
they think of it as insensitive, a rough crude instrument,
stroke it less often than they would a dog.
It’s almost true to say they don’t know what to do with it.
Page(s) 45
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