When you came home from school at dinnertime
already they’d prepared him:
washed the mud from face and hands,
stripped off his sodden clothes, his jacket
draped in dark waterweed, usurping
dandelion, cornflower, dog rose
he’d pick, push into buttonhole
to amuse her.

On bare polished table, tidied, washed
did he look smaller? Did you notice
flecks of grey in his red moustache?
could you eat the bread and cheese,
the apple your Mamgu shone 
on her apron for you?

Did you read the message
in dried and flowing tears,
the looks they gave you?
Did you penetrate the eloquence of silence?

And did you know then, suddenly,
the map for you had changed? Road closed.


Carolyn Thomas is from the Neath valley in South Wales, but has lived on Tyneside since her days as a student at Newcastle University and is now retired after teaching in Further, Higher and Adult Education. She has reviewed for Stand, and, in the last few years, begun writing creatively. She has been longlisted for the Yaffle Prize and her poems have been published in Anthropocene, Dreich, The Ekphrastic Review, Impossible Archetype, These Pages Sing and elsewhere. Her stories have been published in the Honno Press anthologies, Lipstick Eyebrows and Painting the Beauty Queens Orange.