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Gossip

  

in collection, Developing the Negative, 2008,

The Rialto, ISBN 978-0-9551273-3-5;

first published in Smiths Knoll no 41 2007

 

Yours Hopefully

 

       ‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’  R L Stevenson

 

There’s not much news. I have been mulching

the fruit trees, dead-heading tulips.

Your sister’s grown two inches since you left.

 

Thanks for your text. I have posted you marmite, sunblock,

and plasters. The apple blossom’s white as laundry

but doesn’t last. I’m writing airmail to my younger self

 

who is travelling with you, but years before mobiles,

with a red frame rucksack, and hope, that is better than arrival,

scrawled on it in black felt tip. She slits the letters neatly

 

stares at the words, those inky, irrelevant gifts,

skims without reading, goes on without me. You text

cud u send…? and goin 2 timbuktu and I’m afraid

 

of this arrival into another spring unpacking its green

in the same place, to find I’ve laid down compost,

planted tulips, stowed suitcases in the loft. I’m surprised

 

to find myself a source of marmite and small deceptions (grandfather

is not so well), to be the mother whose cooking you say

you miss. Under the red rucksack’s load she’s off again, surviving

 

malaria and tropical storms with only The Grapes of Wrath

and a dented water bottle. I am trying to tell her, on thin blue paper,

exactly how the blossom falls, the tulip involutes. It will be a long letter.

It may never arrive.

 

 

Emily Wills

 

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and in the shop ...
collections - "Developing the Negative"
and
"Diverting the Sea", Rialto

 


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