Still sleepy with humid heat <br />she reaches for the kitchen cupboard, <br />another aspirin to dull the pain. <br />Damp patches beneath her arms tinged with effort <br />and over-permed hair that loops above eyes <br />pale blue, and large as loneliness. <br /> <br />The air stale with school-bags, polished shoes <br />and rubbish-bins full of vegetable peelings. <br />Mum was an ordinary women, <br />he made her ordinary, <br />with second-hand slippers flapping on and off at her heels, <br />she brings the food and wipes away the traces. <br />Plunging headlong into the beating mixmaster would be <br />a tragic way for her to die perhaps. <br /> <br />So she stands-belly bulging <br />set to a sink of Palmolive bubbles, <br />day after day to look so pale, <br />so busted swimming the waves <br />yet never quite coming to the surface. <br />He enters silent and earth-stained, <br />with peasant arms he snakes her heavy waist <br />and gives her a large white carnation as an apology.<br /><br />Sunshine Rose<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/white-carnation/
