Ivy Rose

A red house on the hill...set
ablaze by an evening sunburst.
An ox-eye daisy spotted lawn –
crazy-paving pathway – flowerbed
lined, where calloused hands
dig and hoe like a devil possessed;
her mindset – fuelled by eyes
that rage like the fires of hell.

She dies, a little, every day;
when she goes back inside
there is nobody to notice,
save two Staffordshire dogs...
chipped, and faded, sitting,
mute, on a chest of drawers.

Dust – hangs thick on sills
and wainscots...coals, unlit
in the grate, yet, in the flicker
of widowhood, slowly, she sits –
gazes out the window – hair
scragged up in a rubber-band;

frantic, fugitive strands escaping
when they can, as through a mist
slowly rising, she sees, way back
to the past, when he farmed this land;
where wheat and barley stood tall,
where now, uprooted trees stand –
cenotaphs to a cruel wind’s fury...

A rusted tractor; home to a bunch
of marauding field-mice and rats.
Barren fields – cawing of crows,
the only thing breaks the silence now,
and in the yard, the blinded eye
of a derelict hut, where he ate lunch,
besieged by ivy as it punches
on through...

Its roots run deep – deeper
than even she imagines. Hand
to belly – feels that knot,
deep inside her, take hold,
but slowly, like canker on a rose.
Strangles all it touches; insidious,
it creeps. Even now...and how,
it burns.