Closing the door

Now visits are more like incursions.
Her machine-gun mouth rattling off a
magazine of family events, peppered with
rapid-fire mockery of your accent and long hair.
After she leaves, I am scalded by the sight
of your eyes boiling with tears because I have
allowed us to become complicit in our own ridicule. 
 
My instinct is to deface from memory this woman
who makes a lie of a childhood friendship.
But am persuaded that our 7-year-old selves
are strangers to us now, so leave intact the memory
of two kids whose imaginations collaborated
to create fantastical worlds we spent the summers lost in.
Until at 14 she transformed from tomboy to vamp.
Siren sisters teaching her to play rough then,
first blood a spiteful prank played on a plainer teenager.
 
Later years a friendship with her mother.
Afternoons spent well, her dipping into a treasury
of anecdotes told with Joyce Grenfell verve. 
Our laughter blown around the garden like bubbles.
And always space for me to speak of worries that rubbed,
her nurse’s cumulated common sense
palliating what could not be cured.
In the wake of her funeral, I close the daughter’s
front door firmly behind me.
 
Fiona Sinclair


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