Spotlight poem

Visitor by Cliff Ashcroft

I smell the salt of bacon frying.
A woman pieces out the fat
to her son, her daughter, and herself.
They sit and pour the water
from a tall, cream jug.
No grace is said.
I join them on their stools,
a guest unexpectedly arrived
without gifts. To my surprise
I had trimmed my wick, brought extra oil
and arrived at night bearing a flame
I lifted to my woken host
yawning in the small glow.
Our forks tap the tin plates.
I do not speak their language,
and they do not speak to me,
so we rock in silence, chewing.
One tears the bread and passes the plate.
I raise it to my weathered face
for the moist and fragrant heat.
When we finish we sit in quiet,
the mother turning her bracelets,
the daughter smoothing the sweat in her palms,
the son meeting my flinching eye
in the window’s cold reflection.
I search the soft manila sachets
I keep in my canvas bag
acting on a recollection
I fake and then surrender.
I search the bare kitchen walls
for icons, slips of yellow palm.
There’s nothing but the stove’s soot
and islands of broken plaster.
Taking a few unfamiliar coins
so brown and coarse I can’t make out
the stiff and regal faces
I push them to the mother
who looks up quickly to her daughter.
The son picks out one or two
of the larger, dirtier pieces,
turns them about his thick fingers
and drops them in a tin.
They clatter like an insult.
I slowly lay out my folds of paper.
My chair squeals on the flags.

Taken from his new collection Dreaming of Still Water (Salt)

Front page last updated: 11/05/2009