You did London early, at nineteen:
the basement room, the geriatric nursing,
cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses,
and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office,
Spring 1955, on the rebound.
Marrying was what we did in those days.
And soon enough you were back in Wellington
with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records
buying kitchen furniture on hire-purchase
and writing novels when the babies were asleep.
Somehow you’re still there, I’m here; and now
Sarah arrives: baby-faced like you then,
second of your four blonde Christmas-tree fairies,
nineteen; competent; with her one suitcase
and her two passports. It begins again.
From Fleur Adcock Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2024);
first published in The Inner Harbour (OUP, 1979)
