Flowers and Dust 1987

I leave the cemetery
with a hole in my heart
a pocketful of orphaned buttons
and some half-remembered lines
from an old movie

Sat in a blackened car
between my uncles, their lives
furrowed seams
etched in coal dust,
we shift-pattern the faces
of passing years

In the Co-op tearoom
licensed for today
I am shouldered
by my cousins, no longer
the tom-boy in goal, tolerated,
or the quick-fire counter
chalking up back-door darts

In this village
of rivers and dogs
and the echo
of cobwebbed clocks
the world is a litany
of lanterned landscapes

I sleep with memories trapped
in the draughts of windows
and doorways,
in the lintels
of stone that uphold
the turn of seasons.

Eileen Carney Hulme

in collection, The Space Between Rain, 2010, Indigo Dreams Publishing, ISBN 978-1-907401-12-1;
2nd place, Partners Annual Poetry Competition 2005