Dance Hall
I’d known him since a little boy. Sixteen,
he was, he got a job and disappeared,
to America, they said. The movies.
And then, at the parish Christmas do,
was George himself, lighting a fag. He smiled
and said he’d show me how to jive. He drove
an Austin – Speedwell Blue it was – and told
me we’d be rich. Well, I laughed!
I mean, what would I say to Fred Astaire?
I made the parts for false teeth,
and waltzed in our kitchen with a broom.
So strange,
how it was done, stop-start-stop,
the men holding clapperboards and booms.
George told me just to think of him,
the parish hall at Christmas, not to look towards
the camera’s black mouth. The other girls
were right proper. Actressy. Diana Dors.
I liked her, though she couldn’t dance.
I waited for his letters.
On the gogglebox today,
it shocked me though, to see my legs again.
I don’t wear stockings now. Boys on skateboards stare.
Boat rigging claps into the wind.
I hold the promenade rails, and begin:
one-step, double-step, one-step.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Birthplace
We sweep away the webs of moss which spool
across the granite, and, removing gloves,
dig out the flattened soil, so pots can lodge.
Our fingers freeze, and breathing clouds the air.
A yellow watering can stands by the wall,
this is the church with the cold benches,
where the old Polish priest pinched my cheek.
We cycled to that low-ceilinged school,
just over there, now quiet for the holidays.
On the hillside, streetlamps blink through mist.
He would have been eighty yesterday.
Cigarette, cup of tea, old brown dressing gown,
banished to the greenhouse at first light.
The plants didn’t mind the smoke, he said,
in fact, they liked it. Every day, a blackbird
floated down, and waited, beseechingly, for grubs.
At my sister’s house, I scrub my hands,
the earth circles into water, disappears.
The Boston fern has new growth, uncoiling
from its heart. Hirsute, white-green, implacable.
• Rebecca Duffy is a part time student on the MA Creative Writing and Authorship programme at the University of Sussex. She says “My idea of happiness is getting my writing published and riding my bike.”