Mouth prickled by crumbs of flatbrod, I blurred glass with breath and desire staring at red clay shoes small as my toes - malaprops among silver in her corner cupboard. "They are all I have," she said, her English swinging in the hammock of Danish, "from the earth of my country." When the milk was warmed, a comfort for a child's sleep, she skimmed the skin off - a membrane fragile as the first tissue of ice on a road puddle, "The milkman left you his shirt." Though we were both island born she brought a grandchild little - language and land left behind: a pair of shoes cobbled from clay, the altered garment of an old saying, a voice adrift in a new tongue rocked in the swell of the old. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...WRITTEN [OR LINES] IN A YOUNG LADY'S ALBUM by THOMAS HOOD ARE THE CHILDREN AT HOME? by MARGARET ELIZABETH MUNSON SANGSTER PAN'S PIPING by ALCAEUS OF MESSENE LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND: 3. ISAAC BROWN by WILLIAM ALLINGHAM SONG, FR. ARTAXERXES (OPERA) by THOMAS AUGUSTINE ARNE LONG LIVE LIFE by JACQUES BARON FRAGMENTS INTENDED FOR DEATH'S JEST-BOOK: SLEEPER'S COUNTENANCE by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES IN VINCULIS; SONNETS WRITTEN IN AN IRISH PRISON: CONDEMNED by WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT ON A DISTANT VIEW OF THE VILLAGE AND SCHOOL OF HARROW by GEORGE GORDON BYRON |