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Caroline Price

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Gulliver

Remembering how we would never
have children, I call on you now
to find you surrounded: a chaos
of crayons, Meccano, a train set
I cannot believe you’ve mastered.
And your language has changed, you drop names
which baffle me, your house is filled
with strange characters jostling
on shelves, leaping out from dark places
onto me. You were frightened!
the children cry, crowding round
in their masks and capes while you laugh
and vanish; in an out-of-bounds kitchen
lining up plates, looping our names
across rippled domes of ice cream.
Wash you hands! you call, and obediently
I queue for the toilet, file in
with the five of them, a giant captured
by dwarfs, or a great caterpillar
pulled every way by the ants
which have found it, which claim it
as theirs, bearing it triumphantly back
to the mother of all mothers,
the centre of the nest.

 

Page(s) 40

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