|
Runner-up,
Mslexia Open Poetry Competition 2007
Scissors
‘Scissors’, my mother
told me when I was five,
was
my first real word. That word ‘real’ troubled me:
I
had watched her hold her sheet of newsprint
over
the mouth of the fire to make it draw,
seen
how it singed in the middle, how the words
melted
away, no longer real but gone.
The
scissors remained, snipping, cutting,
slashing
at things. Dangerous. Don’t touch.
Always
missing when she wanted them,
which
made them somehow yet more real
like
a person whose absence is keenly felt.
The
absence of you, for example, my father,
whose
telephone number I still have by heart,
can
still count on my fingers the things you kept
in
your kitchen drawer: two knives, two forks,
one
tablespoon, three teaspoons — the scissors,
that
real word that had you, after my mother’s death,
paring
away your life, snipping at edges,
hacking
off frills, shearing it all down to so little:
a
handful of cutlery, a pair of scissors.
Gill McEvoy
|
