Pat Brown
When She Was A Girl
her legs went in and out
like those rods
that drive wheels on rails
and they spanned the tussocks
between the wickets
ducking the overthrows.
She also spaced the clock
and the pot cat evenly on the mantlepiece
and higgle piggled the rest
into a tea chest going cheap
to anyone with a mind to move
somewhere.
Her bedhead was open slatted
like a white wicket fence
that decorates the boundary.
the foot an unbarred gate
cut of f at the knee
whilst oblongs of corrugated iron
rusted all askew
around the allotments
persuaded by bean tendrils
to deviate
and levered by artichoke roots
out of true.
She watches
merged into the tree trunk
and he is a boy
she is watching so he does not know
anything about frocks with heart-shaped necks
or the strings of beads she keeps
in her old dolls’ house.
And the girl does not know either
what to be next
or when to dump her woolly stockings
and elastic garters.
Page(s) 171
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