Friday 2 December 2016

Poem - Am I Right?


Sepia toned, she faces the camera, with a turned down smile:
Challenges me to guess her secret
That my father never told me
Nor showed me her likeness while he was alive.
Her wavy hair nearly covers her left ear;                                                                      But goes only half way down her right                                                                   
Her long neck is emphasised by a blouse 
With a collar hardly above her shoulder
Pulled together with a decorative chord
Knotted in fashionable bow
                                     Above four shiny white buttons
                                     Bisected by a pearl necklace.
                                     She was obviously important to my father:
                                     Stored in a tin box of his memories
                                     Could she be his mother who died when he was twelve?

And with little imagination, and a change of hair,
Despite our different sexes,
I can see my younger self:
Believe she must be my Granny Griffiths.








But, could this woman have been a despatch rider in the war,
Who frightened the shite out of her husband
As a passenger on her motorbike?
Would the wearer of a string of pearls
Have been a worker in a rubber factory?

Her self-assured school ma’am look
Of somebody who might be only thirty,
But has wisdom beyond her years,
Nods like an infant teacher to a child,

                                     And says, “Yes!”


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