In February I wrote ‘I have all I ever wanted’.
Now this jangling fear, this chasm.
And yet there are times,
walking in lazy bronzed light filtered so slow
and soft through trees, where my panic streams behind me
like ribbons, your voice
burbling gently in my ears, and I forget,
and am happy.
You wonder if it was always like that.
If girls still climbed trees and sang
on their way home between air raids.
If their mothers, weeding necessary vegetable plots
paused to feel cool, damp soil under their fingers,
and the green of growing things.
Somewhere in every civil war is a woman
watching the peach-gold of a sunset
from her back step; and just outside the window
where a child coughs with bloody lungs
in a silent, grieving room, a shopper pauses
to adjust an uncomfortable shoe,
smiles at a refracted rainbow on the brick
beneath her hand, and picks up her basket for home.
Read more:
Rachel Jeffcoat is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Fourth Trimester Magazine, Huff Post UK and Dear Damsels. When not writing at midnight or reading whenever she has a hand free, she can be found on Instagram @rachel__jeffcoat and Medium @racheljeffcoat.
Latest posts by Rachel Jeffcoat (see all)
- The Contract - 11th October 2020
- For My Daughter, Later - 6th September 2020