Kezia Green – who many you will recall from earlier this summer with her poem about Amy Winehouse staying in a caravan – is back, this time she is…
Feeding ducks with Dad
Four disobedient wheels
press gravel on the riverside path;
a pendulum of Mother’s Pride,
tied to the pushchair’s handle,
drumbeats me in the back.
‘Let’s go down to the jetty,’ says Dad,
‘But don’t tell Mum’.
Dad throws his bread (I suck mine)
and the ducks walk on water
to reach the bleached tectonic plates.
Horizontal jive-kicks propel
an advance only
Mum would have noticed:
‘Couldn’t you see how close he was to
the edge?’ she blamed, back home.
I fall face first, still strapped in;
big SPLASH, then slow-going-down,
until I settle, at the bottom,
by a Tesco trolley loom,
woven with greenweed.
My body, unperturbed by its
amniotic return,
is pursued by Dad –
wall eyed with a mercury wake.
He wrenches me free of this Atlantis landfill;
and we rise together,
man, child and pushchair,
to be reborn.
* Kezia Green describes herself as a short lady with dark hair.