Julia Casterton
Allotment
I
Now the rain has come
the garden is alive, it jiggles.
The snail’s muscular foot leaves
snotty silver trails, slugs nod up and down
and worms slide in and out the clods.
‘Ma, wipe my nose.’ I offer her
my mucky skirt.
They’ve just chopped down the sycamore.
Good, now we can grow on the whole patch.
I finger the sawn trunk
count, and reckon back:
it broke its seed in ‘forty-two.
‘Who planted it?’
A magpie maybe shat it out
flash of turquoise underwing
balancing on the bombsite.
Trees don’t care where they come up.
It’s down now, that woman who looks through the fence
said it had broken up her kitchen floor.
II
Ma, let’s see if the toadpoles have enough water.’
We tightrope down the neat brick path
past some smashed enamel tiles.
‘This is where the bathroom was’
and up the bank to the plastic pond
our allotment neighbour has dug in.
‘The only way to keep control of slugs
is toads.’ It leaks, it takes three watering cans
a day. She says it’s sabotage.
They’ve grown legs now, one’s become a toad
no bigger than…
‘Oh, hold it on your hand!’
I do. It hardly moves.
‘Have you killed it?’
I ease my hand below the surface
and feel it swim down.
Three magpies argue above my head.
‘Not the ménage again.’
III
‘Take me home, the cartoons are on,
King Arthur’s on.’
‘Hush child. The mistress of broken sentences is here.
Be quiet, for her sweet sake.’
‘I want the Lady of the Lake.’
Page(s) 40
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