Communal Changing
 
Urban shepherdesses of SW3
(too genteel for country matters)
try on flower-print smocks
in the changing rooms
of Laura Ashley.
 
The glare of the lights in the room full of mirrors
does not spare their bare flesh, but they don’t care
they are too genteel for tits and bums. They are fashionably skinny
not at all like Mr Holman Hunt’s shepherdess, whose clothes
they would like to wear.
 
Hermione is knee deep in peasant frocks
she can’t decide. The pink. The green. The blue.
The flowers, the sprigs, the paisley hue. The looking-glasses
are full of the reflections of other Hermiones. Hermione can’t tell
where she stops and someone else begins.




*Marilyn Francis: I live and work in Midsomer Norton in the wild south west of England. My first poetry collection, red silk slippers, (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2009) was said to, ‘deftly dissect the quotidian’ – I’m still trying to work out what that might mean, in between writing more poems.