Carol Ann Duffy

In the end,
it was nothing more
than the toy boat of a boy
on the local park’s lake,

Now only words in a rhyme,
no more than a name
on a stone,
and that well overgrown –

The heron’s the look of the river.
The moon’s the look of the night.
The sky’s the look of forever.
Snow is the look of white.

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;

Every summer, I visit the Scottish Prince
at his castle high on a hill outside Crieff.
We dine on haggis and tatties and neeps –
I drink water with mine and the Prince sips

One with a broken heart
to weep sad buckets.
Two with four blue eyes

You like safe sounds:
the dogs lapping at their bowls;
the pop of a cork on a bottle of plonk
as your mother cooks;

A clip of thinder ever the reeftips
sends like a bimb going iff!
My hurt thimps in my chist.

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then
I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it
so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,
ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields, our mother singing
our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.
My brothers cried, one of them bawling, Home,

It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun
to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen
filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath
gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,

‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he

If you think of the dark
as a black park
and the moon as a bounced ball,
then there’s nothing to be frightened of

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.

I say her phrases to myself
in my head
or under the shallows of my breath,
restful shapes moving.

for Judith Radstone
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening