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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Robert Etty

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Learn this for Wednesday

They’d left.  I stacked their books and neatened up
some sheets and A4 folders on my desk.

Then Malcolm Haines burst in, clattering the door
and nearest chairs, his eyebrows up, his red bag

slipping off one shoulder, yelling, ‘Ey,
Sir, Sir, you gotta come outside, come on!’

and shoved between displays of lino-cuts
and let the swinging door swing back on me.

I ran behind him past the sundial,
through the car park to the main road where

he pushed apart a group of kids both looking
and not looking at a puffed-up heap of clothes -

white socks, blue ruff of skirt, a buttoned parka
freeing one clean hand that pointed out

the shorter route to Stalybridge.  Some drivers
slowed their cars and stared.  Nobody spoke.

Keith Bell  (the Head of Art)  came running up
and looked and said, ‘OK, kids, off you go,

we’ve phoned up for an ambulance, you go
for tea’, and he and I stood by the girl

for seven minutes till it came.  And when they’d
taken her away he fetched a bucket

and swilled down the drain a ten pence piece-sized
blot of blood.  A woman came towards us from a car

stopped by the gym and said, ‘I think I might have
hit someone.  Has something gone on here?’

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