Susan Hamlyn
Familiar
It walked beside me all the time I was a girl
and now it eyes me like a play-time enemy
with all the bare-faced intimacy of hate.
In adolescence one could scowl and pout
and suck a sulky hair-strand
and it was understood. But, wide-hipped and forty-three,
I want to shamble down the road
unsmilingly anonymous and mute.
There is no glamour in this grown-up gloom
and drink and cigarettes don't dull the smart.
It isn't hormones that, another day,
might swing me onto tree-tops in the sun.
It is machinery which grates and cracks and splits.
It is an opened box of bitter, complex sweets
which, slavering, one eats and eats and eats.
and now it eyes me like a play-time enemy
with all the bare-faced intimacy of hate.
In adolescence one could scowl and pout
and suck a sulky hair-strand
and it was understood. But, wide-hipped and forty-three,
I want to shamble down the road
unsmilingly anonymous and mute.
There is no glamour in this grown-up gloom
and drink and cigarettes don't dull the smart.
It isn't hormones that, another day,
might swing me onto tree-tops in the sun.
It is machinery which grates and cracks and splits.
It is an opened box of bitter, complex sweets
which, slavering, one eats and eats and eats.
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