What Rita tells me

as we walk across the waste ground,
weeds growing wild
around the airfield
 
bare concrete runways
disappearing into the distance,
See these?
 
She points
to purple greenish bean-like things.
They’re mouse traps.
 
Men planted them.
Be careful,
they’ll catch your legs.
 
We’re in sandals.
I imagine a soft brown harvest mouse,
trapped and bleeding.
 
From then on I’m scared of the pods,
whipping at our ankles
as we run –
 
even after I find out Rita made it up.
 

Janet Hatherley

first published in Stand, Vol. 17(4), 2019, ISSN 2041-4056;
in collection What Rita Tells Me, 2022, Dempsey & Windle,
ISBN 978-1-9133297-7-8

 
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Trotline

You take a line, about twenty feet, unwind –
tie each end to a piece of pig iron.
At low tide, bury the ends in the sand.
 
You bait the hooks before the tide turns
and make sure you’re back at the next low tide.
You’ll get bass – be careful of the spines.
 
Often, with the changing tides, Mum had
to slip out of bed, not waking Dad – set off
with an anorak over pyjamas, to stride
 
through gusts of wind to crashing seas, white froth,
the deafening noise, with a bike lamp’s feeble light –
imagining a sea serpent lifting her aloft.
 
This way she fed us, until we grew quite
tired of bass, so she sold it to the fishmonger.
Her biggest fish, after one wild night
 
gained her a photo in the local paper –
a twelve and three quarter pound cod,
pride of place in the Chichester Observer.
 
In winter sun, Fred, our cat, followed Mum, trod
warily over seaweed, paddled in rock pools.
She looked for whelks – where are they, the little sods!
 
He sniffed the air as she found one, its smell rose
with the knife, a quarter fixed on a single hook.
Whelks stay on better than limpets, as it goes.
 
One rainy night Mum looked up, what a shock!
All the whelks so hard to find earlier –
on the breakwater, glistening in the black.
 
On the sea wall, most of East Drive’s neighbours
had put up fencing. It went along the bay.
No one could walk along, cross the barbed wire.
 
Coming home that night Mum lost her way.
She walked around in circles, the tide had turned.
Only one place to climb up, to be okay.
 
Who’d know she was there, or be concerned?
The sea was coming in so fast and rough –
no one awake and waiting her return.
 

Janet Hatherley

first published in Spelt, Spring 2021, ISSN 2635-0777;
in collection What Rita Tells Me, 2022, Dempsey & Windle,
ISBN 978-1-9133297-7-8

 
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A walk round Hampstead

It’s our anniversary.
Somehow we find hidden streets
we’ve never walked before.
 
We’ll have another thirty-four years, I say –
no arguments have split us yet,
no aching heart.
 
In the cemetery here’s Constable’s grave.
But here, and here, look, the names have gone,
the stone is quite green.
 
In a walled garden at Fenton House
we find two deckchairs.
It’s only us, and the grass is bright,
 
the bees on the lavender, insects drifting.
So we fall asleep.
Half an hour goes, just like that
 
in the shade of an apple tree.
A blackbird sings, flutters into the hedgerow,
my eyelids half open to the sun.
 
And I don’t know, how could I –
you carry your heavy toll of days
and only five are left.
 

Janet Hatherley

published in Brittle Star, Issue 46, June 2020, ISSN 1467-6230

 
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The clock test and other regrets

Regret 1
not remembering whether we kissed goodbye at the kitchen door
 
Regret 2
your best friend and the paramedics
couldn’t bring you back to life
 
Regret 3
being at West Lodge Arboretum at the exact time of your dying
 
Regret 4
not knowing for four hours
 
Regret 5
everywhere the sun shone
 
Regret 6
your dying in Eastbourne caused problems
for the clerk at Haringey Register Office
 
Regret 7
outside the Registrar’s window
the wedding party smiled for photos in the sun
 
Regret 8
six weeks passing
 
Regret 9
not taking my blood pressure seriously enough
 
Regret 10
you weren’t there at my hospital bedside
after the stroke
 
Regret 11
not working out the change
from a coffee at Costa as the therapist watched
 
Regret 12
I forgot how to draw a clock
 

Janet Hatherley

Highly Commended and published in anthology The Ver Prize, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7397719-1-1

 
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