About Your Mother’s Face

 

Mother was ordinary until classmates staring at her

on Speech Day squealed: Your mum’s so pretty,

her face becoming  your own status symbol to rival

their parents’ e-type jags and mansions.

 

But as men gawped at her in the street,                             

your silent adolescent scream Look at me too! 

Other times, catching your own breath at

her moss-agate eyes that changed colour with her moods.

 

Paparazzi, snapping as she swept through Heathrow,

knew she should be model, actress or concubine ,

Yet her ambition was to ‘look out her kitchen window

and see a reliable husband digging in his garden.’     

 

But he could not imagine your mother stooping to vacuum,

so she drew only prospectors and connoisseurs

who licking their lips as if undressing Marilyn

soon found they were fucking Doris Day and left.

 

Proving to friends that ‘Mother was a great beauty’,

you present a solitary portrait 6 by 5,

taken in middle age to celebrate her glamour’s climax,

that is disfigured  by melancholy.

Fiona Sinclair

If you have any comments on this poem, Fiona Sinclair would be pleased to hear from you.