Victorian redbrick colliery terrace,
Front garden like a small box of soot,
Brass knob blue door into a kitchen parlour,
Oilcloth floor, black horsehair sofa,
Scrubbed top kitchen table with swelling fluted legs,
A chest of drawers with its linen press.
Below the wooden mantel, the range is black as jet;
Wash boiler, oven, kettle on the hob plate,
Coal hissing dragon-red in basket grate.
On the white washed hearth a cup is set.
A stick back rocking chair in which
A fragile being, who was once a woman, sits.
Navy white print dress, black shawl with fringe,
Wavy white silk hair, amber yellow skin,
A skull dressed up for polite company,
Her deep set eyes flicker "hello, hinny."
A hundred train miles endured
And I'm a tired four year old.
She with her breasts and womb cut out,
Existing on nothing but morphine and stout,
She has to endure narcotic dreams of hell.
I am greeting her, but she is saying farewell.
Rosewood desk bed, curved, barleytwist,
Mirror'd, mantel'd, niched, arcaded, cherished;
Its lid and doors unfold a bed with white sheets,
White sheets like a billow cloud, bearing her away,
Pathetic body and yellow death's head on the pillow.
Loud hymns we sing as I sit on the bed,
An untuned flute and a cracked bell.
I wanted to know her better.
I wanted to know her well.
Coal is a hard life, and for this miner's wife
A hard life and a hard death.
That night she floated away on a white billowing morphine cloud.
1981
Mary Argent copyright