Allotment
I just have to see those rigs,
those bed-spread patches,
to see my mother sewing
fragments of grown-out-of clothes,
to make a summer skirt.
She laid the colours like plants,
like rows of summer blossom,
the cup of tulips, the tuck of roses,
the corduroy of new turned rigs,
I wore a garden in the sun.
While outside, my father
lined up wigwams for beans,
telling us wide-eyed children
they were magic, would grow
to the sky, where giants
might sing to a magic harp.
One by one, we lost belief
until there was only
the little red flowers,
the curling tendrils, the
fattening pods. Breathe in
and hide in the leafy tent,
runs a thumb down the seam,
pop the pods, catch the beans,
now that was magic.
Vivien Jones‘ first poetry collection – About Time, Too – was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in September 2010. In that year she also won the Poetry London Prize. She has completed a second short fiction collection on a theme of women amongst warriors – White Poppies (2012) – with the aid of a Creative Scotland Writer’s Bursary and has adapted two of the stories for theatre performance in 2013. In February 2014 her first e-book – Malta Child – was published – memoirs of four childhood years in Malta in the late 1950s. Her second poetry collection – Short of Breath – was published in November 2014 by Cultured Llama Press.