After the funeral
you set the table
for one place less. Not waiting
to be asked, for once.
You take down a bottle of regret,
pop the cork, and pour
us all a glass.
Deep draughts keep us each
afloat, or some similar sensation
just-the-once removed from drowning.
She serves us piled plates of steamed
devotion, as we stare out at great estate
of a single, koi-filled pond.
Weeping willows smile
a shade of green too vibrant
for their tear-stained name.
I can't reach the greengage and my tomatoes are blight-ridden.
I pick my steps around the bruised plum mess on our garden path.
These moth-moulded windfalls should be apple green
and tart as their tree-top brethren I cannot reach.
My surviving marmandes swell proud ridges
of grassy goodness but late to the party as always,
this Cinders doesn't spot the tobacco stains behind their smiles.
No-one mentions that if she really had spent years scrubbing,
she'd struggle to walk in heels – magic or not. I'd have to kick
them away too, disintegrating as fairy godmother's naproxen wore off.
This London clay wasn't blight-ridden when I moved here.
Could the rain-carried pain be my banshee's caoineadh,
soothing my homesickness in its own morbid way?
_______________
Sarah O’Connor is an Irishwoman in London, where she works backstage in theatre & opera. Her poems can be found in Abridged, Bangor Literary Journal, The Broken Spine, Green Ink Poetry, Honest Ulsterman, Ink Sweat & Tears, Re-side, Shooter, and anthologies from Fly on the Wall Press and Victorina Press.
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