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Myra Schneider

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Picnic

She had long given up creating plays
with a lead role for herself:
misused Mary Queen of Scots

trailing black velvet. Now she talked
in private with dead writers:
Coleridge, Shelley, Charles Lamb,

at school copied the hostile silence
kept up by her rival, Reita
whom she secretly adored. But after a girl

who’d won a scholarship to Oxford died,
they talked shakily, together
cut and buttered slices of bread

for the treat Miss Loom had thought up,
then shivering with joy, held hands
in the silence of the school’s garden.

Midsummer, heat drumming on backs
as they climbed the steep Downs
and smiled at wings blue as harebells.

At the summit she broke. For all its shine
the world was riddled with hunger,
diseases whose names she was still learning,

and death was an enormous mouth
that peach and pink sunsets
wouldn’t satisfy. When her sobs didn’t stop

Miss Loom, whose face was cloudless,
led her to a chalky hummock,
promising the heights of life lay ahead

as if they were glittering towers on the plain
stretching to the sea below,
as if they weren’t impossible to reach.

 

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