Runner-up in Mslexia’s Women’s Poetry
Competition 2005,
judge - Jo Shapcott, published in
Mslexia,
26, ISSN
1473-9399
Metro
Boy
Maybe that’s his father with the
polystyrene cup
up under the nose of a woman who averts her
eyes,
sighs and mouths above the violin, ‘He should
be in school.’
‘Fool. Fuck you. This boy knows already how to
play.’
Aged five or younger, Wolfgang could compose
in different keys.
Trees shivered off their snow. Salzburg echoed
to his chords.
Swords clattered to the floor. Wooden tops
unwound.
Sound was every new thing. Leopold praised and
raged.
Sleeping in a trailer, out of town, by the
maize field,
steeled by tracks, this boy dreams in minims,
quavers,
savours the black leaping notes that climb the
bars.
Cars murmur nursery rhythms in his head,
keeping
time with some vague remembered fingering.
‘Bitch,
bitch,’ his step-father shouts out to the
night’s halved moon.
Soon a requiem slow dances its way into the
boy’s mind,
winds the opening of train doors into the
ostinato’s rhyme.
Stephanie
Norgate
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