I Keep Returning To This Line In My Childhood
I keep returning to this line in my childhood
I once stood in one dreaded day
every month with my mother
to prove I was loyal and reliable,
waiting for food at what was
back in the late fifties
called the Foodstall.
Though we were not animals.
We were simply poor
at the mercy of the God-wielding charities
and though it’s nowhere near the same degree
as it is of kind, we almost felt
like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.
Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love
with two or three whining kids
that were plague rats of measles,
mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,
agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.
Natives, dried-out rummies
with faces like desiccated orange peels,
more alcoholics than druggies back in those days,
the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand
they kept falling into, some lambs
and some the tigers
that wouldn’t lie down with them.
Lonely bachelors that came out
of their self-imposed exiles
once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs
they carried home in a big brown
Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag
stitched together like the parched skins of mummies,
as if they were carrying a woman back to their place
like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched
to populate Rome with their solitude.
Women with too much make-up on,
a lot of them bruised,
their black eyes waxing from dark blue
to the festering yellow of ruined orchids,
as my mother’s used to
before my old man left for good.
A few boisterous madames
with chameleonic hair
that changed colour every month,
laughing and talking too loud
as if to show the more righteous among mothers
how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were
in the face of anyone’s disapproval,
as if they always had a trick up their sleeve,
though that wasn’t always the case
or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
