Helena Nelson
Cleaner
Mrs Philpott cleans the bathroom
cleaner than any living soul.
She scrubs the bath with a nylon brush,
steams the tiles with her steam machine,
sprays with anti-bacterial spray,
polishes with a spotless cloth
and sometimes as she cleans she sings
in a high clear voice that no-one hears
but the bathroom and its silent walls
and the mirror and the laundered towels
and the patient gleaming toilet bowl.
If this had not been her special gift -
perhaps that day as she stood in the hall
unhooking her coat from the pegs to leave,
he wouldn’t have noticed the gentle blush
dusting the inside curve of her elbow -
he wouldn’t have thought: it is like the rush
of light in the beech hedge when each hard bud,
surprised into softness, unfolds.
Helena Nelson lives and works in Fife. This poem is one of a lengthy sequence.
Page(s) 41
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