About your mother’s face.

 

 

Now your memory has degraded,

a suspicion  that mother’s beauty was overestimated.

Youthful photographs, like early snaps of Marilyn,

offer no clues as to her face’s full potential.

The portrait celebrating her beauty’s climax in middle age

disfigured by melancholy.

 

Mother was ordinary until class mates informed

Your mum is so pretty,

later, the adolescent smart ,  walking invisible beside her

as men rubber necked in the street ,

suggestions that her face deserved an even wider audience

when paparazzi raised their cameras at Heathrow.

Yet her ambition,  To look out her kitchen window

and see a reliable husband digging in his garden.

But drawing only a gold rush of rogues to her front door,

she became a sheep in a wolf’s skin coat

trotting down the high street unable to pay the gas bill.

Incredible now, house – keeping willingly sacrificed

for Vichy skin preparations ,

heated rollers crowning snow white’s hair,

a wing of 50s movie star eyeliner swept above agate eyes,

before she could face her public..

 

Twenty years since you have with in breath

glimpsed mother’s face across a shop,

but occasionally now you are ambushed

by Ava Gardner on TV and change channels.