That’s when she went to ground,

after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped,

where people not like us
lived behind the hedge, heard but not seen,
that’s where she went to ground

they believe, in a shack they finished in green,
somewhere she rarely went, made her dens
on the terrace, in winter under the stairs,

an obstinate cat who shuns the basket you buy,
who maybe found the drain
they buried under the concrete floor.

Maybe she knew all along? Stole a wrench
to let out the dark, bunched her fingers into paws,
sleeked her dirt-tosser body mole,

a velvet tube of spine and skull, tunnelling
under the grass, gobbling paralysed worms,
the slender bones of mice, shreds of spider legs.

Her parents lived bereft, restless with want,
never let her go, her brush still stiff with paint,
the splintered door she slammed

after they said no. Tea on the lawn abandoned,
spoil heaps blotted the grass, a hint of something
listening in, something exhaling rage,

breathing it back in. Forensics sampled the soil
each year. DNA or a torn-off nail? Her tea set stood
as evidence, blue made resplendent red.

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and former academic. In 2013 New Writing North awarded her a New Poets Bursary. After magazine and anthology publications since 1985, Oversteps Books published her collection, Going to bed with the moon in 2019. jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk