Poem for the Day: Country Gate Swings Back on a Country Girl

Country Girl Swings Back on a Country Gate

Imagine a radio playing, the Voice of America,

and a slivered moon above a country cottage

in green and cream weatherboard.

A country girl swings back on a country gate,

the pulse of the landscape creaking with her,

sound of metal like strangled heat in December.

Parents tap her on the shoulder,

send her off to church. Funny way of bringing

God into your life when she prefers the beach.

The sky’s too bright to strap her in.

The shed school bullies down the beach,

drowning their faces in a flap of coats.

In the midst of family chores, the stars are crazy

in a storm. She remembers the circling

huntsman spinning music on the gramophone.

In the fork of a wooden gate, she hollers at the boys

dragging timber up the lane. A tree-house allows the blue

of clouds, tinted leaves and only birdsong in.

Childhood days -  father stacking bottles near the shed,

mother feeling every cotton drop from the Singer
like egg shells breaking when he passed.

There’s only one woman she loves supreme. Gran

in floured hands, clipping hedgerows in the heat. 

Sundays, teaching her to knit and sew into silence.

She left scrapbooks filled with cake, tobacco days of rum

and horse-drawn carts. She left  tins of buttons and pearls,

the house and land, the memories she traversed on.