Jenefer Ann Murray
On Being Treated Right
Who is treated right? Anybody?
I wasn’t.
Sent by loving parents to a school I loathed
a boarding school
dull, dull, a thousand times dull
where my mother had been happy
on the hockey field
beating big drum in orchestra
making much noise with friends
she said
preferable to home
I gathered
Father a parson, mother a cipher
huge great vicarage sunk in fields
brother the favourite
given a fort for Christmas
and she, a hairbrush
not treated right, was she
and neither was he
died aged eighteen
in France nineteen sixteen
wounded in groin, bled to death
another foundered hope
I left that school brain-scarred
with apparently ineradicable tattoos
designed to last
which still emerge suddenly
and shock.
If you want to be yourself
not a sheep in a flock
you must battle - knock knock
for it amuses insiders to mock
and quietens their probably unrealized
misgiving.
Page(s) 31
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