Emily Anne

Emily-Anne picks up her home:
A tattered book, a toothless comb,
() A yellowed letter singing praises to her charms.
She packs away her memories,
With the bottle that brings ease,
In the battered bag she clutches In her arms.
Raucous rooks disturb the northern morn,
From the trees outside the town.
A goods-train shakes the railway bridge’s dust
On her «Daily Mirror «eiderdown.
And the mill-girls shudder from their sleep,
Dreams of princes dying with the dawn.
Clogs that clatter on the cobbled road
Warn her that another day is born.
Cockney sparrows squabble constantly,
Scrabble for the crumbs around her feet:
She breaks the barren bread of poverty,
Shares it with the sorrows of the street.
And the pigeons on the pedestals
Desecrate the sleeping statues stones,
They’re immune to authority,
She sees the time has come to go.
Finches fidget in the hawthorn hedge,
Bees desert the Kentish country lane,
She reads the signs and searches for a barn,
To shelter from the coming of the rain.
And as she huddles in among the straw,
She feels his gentle hand caress her waist,
When the drumming of the raindrops cease,
The fiction of his face begins to fade.
Seagulls circle over lazy waves,
Seaweed scents the sunlit Sussex sand,
She holds a shell between her fingertips:
Wrinkled like the skin upon her hand.
Laughing, shouting kids on skipping feet,
With their spades and buckets scurry by.
While the ocean of her loneliness
Stretches to the margins of the sky.