Mourning Bracelet

I wear my sisters round my wrist.
Loop over loop their twisted
hair chafes my skin as I write
here in the kitchen late at night;
who is it clears her throat before
the clock’s strike at turn of stair,
whose the face in the copper pan?
 
Out of the gate for air, I run
and they’re leaping now from stone
to stone. Down the cobbled lane
I fly in Anne’s best cotton gloves,
the hob-nailed boots Emily loved.
Footsteps when there’s no-one there,
just these twists of my sisters’ hair.
 

Carole Bromley

First prize-winner in the 2011 Brontë Society Literary Competition;
published in Brontë Studies;
in collection, A Guided Tour of the Ice House, 2011, Smith/Doorstop Books,
ISBN 978-1-9066133-1-0