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YouTube
ppf Playlist: Emily Wills reading her poem
Gossip
in
collection, Developing the Negative, 2008,
The
Rialto, ISBN 978-0-9551273-3-5;
first published in Smiths
Knoll no 41 2007
Yours Hopefully
‘To
travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’ R L Stevenson
There’s
not much news. I have been mulching
the
fruit trees, dead-heading tulips.
Your
sister’s grown two inches since you left.
Thanks
for your text. I have posted you marmite, sunblock,
and
plasters. The apple blossom’s white as laundry
but
doesn’t last. I’m writing airmail to my younger self
who
is travelling with you, but years before mobiles,
with
a red frame rucksack, and hope, that is better than arrival,
scrawled
on it in black felt tip. She slits the letters neatly
stares
at the words, those inky, irrelevant gifts,
skims
without reading, goes on without me. You text
cud
u send…? and goin 2 timbuktu and I’m afraid
of
this arrival into another spring unpacking its green
in
the same place, to find I’ve laid down compost,
planted
tulips, stowed suitcases in the loft. I’m surprised
to
find myself a source of marmite and small deceptions (grandfather
is
not so well), to be the mother whose cooking you say
you
miss. Under the red rucksack’s load she’s off again, surviving
malaria
and tropical storms with only The Grapes of Wrath
and
a dented water bottle. I am trying to tell her, on thin blue
paper,
exactly
how the blossom falls, the tulip involutes. It will be a long
letter.
It
may never arrive.
Emily Wills
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