Poetry Monday

Marbled Chocolate

When I think back

to my first taste of chocolate,

it smacks of your seed cake

almonds neatly layered on top.

A treat on Saturday

after piano practise,

one thin slab on a white china plate

choked down with a glass of milk.

A penance, 

but I never dared to tell you.

I remember your anger

when I came home from Mulligan’s,

told you they had shop-bought cake,

a triangle of marbled sweetness;

Battenberg.

They had sliced pan too;

white and fluffy,

and on Fridays, fish and chips,

lashed with salt and vinegar,

wrapped in newspaper.

I used to stand outside the chipper

watch people queue,

hungered to be like them.

You beat me senseless.

the cane snapped in two 

as I bent over in apology.

You shouted that they

were common and poor,

and shop-bought

was a sin.

I lost all interest in food.

and spent years in therapy

learning how to eat.

Remembering my Great Grandfather 11.11.11

My Great Grandfather
W. T. Pickering, G/3371, 2nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers
Died 1916 at the Somme, commemorated on the Thipeval Memorial, France
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Remembrance day ..
A field of bright red poppies dance
As I walk hand in hand with my children
Through the battle fields of the Somme.
In my pocket, I have a bunch of wheat
A token memory from where he fell
At peace, to have walked where he walked.

As the poppies begin to fade....
I hear the thunder of guns, shrieking shells
I see a vast sea of dismembered bodies
A No-Man’s Land of mud and wire
A military display of golden fireworks
Casting light on this horrific hell on earth.

For underneath the poppies lie, the remains
Of so many men, who died, blown to pieces;
Where a river of blood will forever bleed
Passed on from generation to generation
The great loss of war, which nobody wins
As I remember William Thomas Pickering
So far away from home....

Rusty Clippings

The old lady who lives
in the house on the seafront
stands with rusty shears
trimming her hedge of purple Hebe.
elbows bent, she clips salty air
hoping for visits from passers-by.

A sprawling house
collapsing from years of disrepair,
her world exists in a solitary room.
Loneliness seeps from
faded rose patterned wallpaper.
Curtains sag, stale with senility.
A tired burgundy carpet
threads the stairs
to a forgotten world.
Framed photographs
stare from the mantelpiece,
their faces buried in her memory.

Her eyes look to the sea,
absorbed by the soothing swish of the waves.
Her life, held in the ripples
of an ever changing tide
and the rusty shears by the hedge.






© Maire Morrissey-Cummins