Spindles
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims,
exchanging threads in packets hung on one another’s gates,
and wondered could we find a way to tell our mums we loved them,
without intimating to them quite how frightened we’d become.
We progressed to park-bench coffees, spoke of pressures on our daughters
now cloistered in their bedrooms, online behind slammed doors;
compared damage to the woodwork and the problem of old hardware,
admitting it unlikely that we’d source replacement spindles –
the shift to metric from imperial lost something in translation,
and when the thread wears thin the grub screw fails to bite.
Amanda Bell is an award-winning writer whose books have been published by Doire Press, Fine Press Poetry, Onslaught Press, Alba Publishing and Wildflower Poetry Press. She is an assistant editor of The Haibun Journal. Repped by The Book Bureau. www.