Elizabeth Bartlett
Dover Beach
We are swanning up and down
the promenade, beauty and the beast.
She is pretty and clever and I am
ugly but also clever, my frown
of concentration gets me to the top
of the class, her velvety eyes
and widow’s peak get her boy friends.
Suddenly, among the holiday crowds,
the black shirts come for the summer,
strutting round our seaside town,
alien and exciting, handing out
pamphlets and sexy as hell,
but we are only schoolgirls
in scuffed sandals and cotton frocks.
We don’t stand a chance,
but neither do they, eventually.
The men we married squashed them
under their heels like cockroaches,
wearing black army boots and khaki shirts.
Dead sexy.
Elizabeth Bartlett is 75 and has published six collections of poetry; the latest, Two Women Dancing (Bloodaxe 1995), won the Cholmondeley Award. She appears in two major new anthologies, Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry and The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945.
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