A walk in the morning, a fine spring day,
eight little legs prance through dew in wet grass,
they ignore drops and drips, they run and play,
Mexican stand off, bow to each other,
chase round the meadow, chase birds and squirrels,
sniff at March scents, searching for who knows what?
Walking small dogs on a fine spring day.
Polly Stretton © 2021
The kids flew the nest long ago
their chicks are grown
and have chicks of their own.
All send something–
a text with a kissing emoji,
‘There’s a bag by the gate.’
Lockdown.
Mum texts, ‘Thank you,’
adds a hug, sends love,
collects the bag before it gets damp.
A tear
trails through blusher,
marks make up
that no one will see,
splashes onto her best blouse.
She thinks of other mums,
fingers tremble,
she puts the TV on,
switches it off.
A cup of tea and sit on the sofa
surrounded by gifts and cards,
she opens the cards, alone,
reads,
misses faces,
misses hugs,
will open the packages later.
Polly Stretton © 2021
😘
We live in canvas bells for five days’
sweat-clammy shelter,
hot in fields of hay,
as a great war rages.
Anne and I become snake
and snake charmer around a smoky campfire.
The menfolk ‘on the front’
– some of our dads –
kill.
My dad’s a Local Defence Volunteer. He has a gun.
We have a singsong, Pack Up Your Troubles for wide-eyed mothers,
nurses, head-scarved land girls,
and munitions factory workers, canary-faced women
who feast on fat pork spitting
splitting sausages that stay
on the tongue with charred onion breath, for hours.
We wonder what it’s like
on the bloody muddy Western front.
Will jam jars and cotton reels really help?
If You Were The Only Girl In The World…
our mothers’ eyes shine.
Big blue-garbed Girl Guides
tease us because we’re brown
– few gongs yet –
Me, arms akimbo, in a khaki sleeping bag;
writhing, serpentine, up and down,
side to side,
while Anne tootles, fluting on her recorder,
face dark with gravy browning.
In the trenches guns shatter eardrums, pop eyeballs, make mush of bones.
The big girls give out rubbery gas masks
– hard to breathe –
they send messages using small flags;
wrinkle soapy fingers in hospitals; lather and launder dressings;
roll bandages; prep stretchers for bleeding bodies.
We collect warm hens’ eggs, harvest cabbages and keep our chins up,
knit socks and scarves for the Tommies,
and hope our mums don’t get a telegram.
Polly Stretton © 2014
This poem was published in Remember, the Paragram Poetry Anthology 2014, I mentioned this in conversation with my friend, Mike Alma, who has sent me the photo below to show what the Girl Guides looked like in the early 20th century. Many thanks Mike. Here is Mike’s photo of Doris and Peg, bet they loved camping.
Mike’s mum as a Guide circa 1920
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