Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Wallis
All House Holds
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Once stuffed with baby breaths, the back bedroom
holds only a tallboy
with stashed school reports, ties without shirts,
blazers limp as puppets.
Hornby childhoods spilling like kapok,
the old home is a flickering of carriages.
Bikes, injured Bear-Bear, Mouse . . . first words
haunt one of these cupboards.
Mother’s remains are mothballed – lavender bags, frocks,
twin-sets with matching accoutrements.
Beside her bed, dead in a drawer, Dad’s
just a clinker of cufflinks and collar studs.
Peter Wallis has been a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition and is author of Half Other (The Hippocrates Press, 2023) https://www.hippocrates-poetry.org/publications-by-hippocrates/p/half-other-by-peter-wallis He is also Submissions Editor for the UK charity Poems in the Waiting Room.
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