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The moon pulls and pummels the earth. Every day the tonnes are washed up and dried in pans on the water’s edge, stowed in sacks and bags, transported on the backs of lorries, shovelled into bins and metal containers and hoisted into the holds of ships and iron tankers for the bag filling factories of Kent, the depots of Leeds and Birmingham, the shops in Bolton and Huddersfield, small concerns that sell methi leaves, haldi, coffee and pickled cucumbers. A little kindness in salt, a little bitterness on the tongue, on the rim of a glass of margarita in a bar in Manchester, in a single tear that waits to be cried.
This is how I mourn. You’re on my shoulders. We’re rattling over tarmac. The handlebars judder up my arms. A long swoop to the sea. Platinum waves, dogs, a buff coloured bay that curves for miles. It’s right the older one of us should survive to do this, that you lean over me. You’ve earned the vantage point. Here’s to every death defying fast descent I’ll ever make. Here’s to a week of solitude that’s been the opposite of grief. The flood of self-pity never came. There is no tidal bore of sorrow. It’s not as if you haven’t left before. I should have known it wouldn’t be dramatic. I should have expected this vast grey Atlantic.
Penury was surely that small room. The smell of static, the crush and rustle of satin, the crackling petticoats.
It’s a wonder she didn’t go mad. It’s a wonder she didn’t go blind sewing sequins all night.
Hours and hours counting the halves and thirds, turning hems, stitching velvet collars and piping,
her fingers scrambling like spiders in the button tin, in the evenings jabbing pins in the cushions on the mantelpiece.
Bolts of material on her shelves, tissue paper in cardboard boxes, yellow organdie scallops, flowers.
She had photos of famous people on the walls, a tray of boiled sweets on the window sill. She wore gold slippers and stretch trousers.
She was listening to the plastic radio she kept plugged into the light socket. There was something about an anniversary.
She kept her head down. She was frowning. Young soldiers, flamethrowers, Belsen. You could see the tattoo on her forearm.
The needle kept pricking in and out, small popping noises, accurate and quick. It was a thing of beauty. The tattoo.
That she’d survived, that she could do this. She wore her sleeve rolled up. The shame was theirs, not hers.
The florin and sixpence in the purse is her mother's trust in her.
She’ll hop skip and jump down the road look left, look right, look left again
and cross and cross the great big ocean the wide Sargasso of cars and buses
all on her own to the Express Dairy which is blue and white as the foaming sea.
Yo ho ho for a packet of tea and a bag of sugar some milk and some butter to melt by the fire
when the sad coal scuttles and shunts like worn out tired old siding engines.
See how the apricot sun is descending how the cutty surf threads between green gold and red
and she doesn’t stop she runs instead to the razorbill sharp bird-flapping edge.
She has ruby earrings and a black-tarred pigtail. The snakes on her arms, which the first mate drew
with some ink and a nail whilst the crew wasn’t looking she swapped for a kiss when the lookout slept.
Her cutlass is lean as a scolding tongue. Her limbs are as strong as any boy's.
She climbs up the rigging and scratches the sky with her sailor’s grin and her chart-maker's eye.
See how the petrels are towing her out past pebbled seals and switch-backed dolphins.
The cormorants dry their boomerang wings and plunder the peaks for silvery fish.
Her lungs are rasped by the captain’s smoke box. Oh how the petrels are towing her out.
Lagoon! Lagoon! The gold doubloons of inlet sound. She climbs down aft and rows her shallop out.
She shanties the buck and ridge and swell and drags her boat to the scrunty rocks.
She ties it up with a mooring hitch and watches the skin of the ripening sun.
Her galleon rides the crease and furrow safe as a baby, safe as a baby.
It's rocked from its belly by the anchor below. The wood, the masts, the ropes turn black.
She watches, she waits and now, at last, the sun begins to swallow the sea,
drinking it from the tilting cup on the other side of the world.
Too soon! Too soon! The first mate rings the angelus bell.
Her kissing mate rings the ship’s church bell, St. Edward’s Catholic Confessor bell.
He calls her back to the dry bone land and dusty, dusty evensong.
Heave-ho to the red bus Finchley Road, Hoop Lane and all the traffic lights
to the semi-detached October evening with her mother's order under her arm.
She's walking home to the fire and the sink to the liver brown lino and the things that click
like dentures, knitting and electric lights with tuppence ha’penny in the purse, her mother’s trust in her.
Under the pillow where her dreams spill out is a bloody nail and a bottle of ink.
She’s planning things, great future things in the blotting paper silence.
Nobody sees the dragon rise, my sister's earth-spinning dragon rise.
Nobody sees its east-west eyes. Nobody looks that far.
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