Doors are opening like nails
pricking tiny points into limbs, she thinks
but nothing says. Oh, this is the time
of the coming, the future, the eyes strained ahead
to the one perfect rhyme and the rest
of the dead.
She says nothing of memories of parks
and her dad on the see-saw. For lollypopped years
weight gave him the firm upper-hand, but one time
a overdue growth-spurt left things in the balance.
Bit by bit she started to climb. There was silence.
All the sad sentiment, all the rusty old fears
she’d end up with a poet or (better) in tears
hurt the more. He slowly eyed up from below
what the babe had become. How she’d grown. And right there
sprouted that instant a newborn grey hair.
Now the landscape was changed. Now the light
that may once have been left on all night
won’t keep her safe.
The door’s opening, girl. It’s raining and dark
and the wind is blowing out the door, slowly,
disjointedly . . . you wonder
what it’s opening for.