Camera Obscura
Eight-year-old
sitting in Bramhall’s field,
shoes
scuffed from kicking a stone,
too
young for a key but old enough now
to
walk the short mile back from school.
You’ve
spied your mother down in the village
crossing
the street, purse in her fist.
In
her other hand her shopping bag nurses
four
ugly potatoes caked in mud,
a
boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish
in
grease-proof paper, the price totted up
in
penciled columns of shillings and pence.
How
warm must she be in that winter coat?
On
Old Mount Road the nearer she gets
the
smaller she shrinks, until you reach out
to
carry her home on the flat of your hand
or
your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.
Source
of the text – Simon Armitage, from Poetry
December 2015, vol. CCVII, no. 3, p. 258.
TJB: Riddle-like,
packed with details—clues?—the poem has a narrator seeing a past self seeing
his mum at a distance, then a lyrical revelation.
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