Poetry my arse

An excursion into a more lyrical world, brought on by clean-ups, manzanilla and muses.

Lost and Found

I found her

Hidden behind the front row of books

Scraping back layers of words

Carefully blowing the dust off fragments

Of other lives.

She was lurking there, at twenty-something

Among complete collections of Greene

Hunted in Bloomsbury bookshops on lunchtime jaunts

Seed, breed and generation in a row of Chambers dictionaries

One for every thirty-three years of a century passed

Cheek by jowl with Dineen and de Bhaldraithe

And a half-remembered slew

Of darker fictions, a briefing for her own descent

Most poignantly,

In unused tomes on illustration

The silent row of poetry books, unspoken words

Child, girl, woman,

Daughter.

My copies and his twinned.

I wept to find a treasury

Of words and memories,

A brief history

Of who I am

And still am not.

And still not grown

At thirty-three or any other age

But growing yet.

Cathy Dalton

27 July 2013