Three Poems by Betty Doyle
Dad’s Birdfeeders
Now that I am happy again,
I can stand at the kitchen sink,
peeling potato skins
and watch the birds land.
Nesting sparrows trill in our willow’s hollow.
A single blackbird, needle-beaked.
A row of robins warming the fence,
fluting winter’s song and waiting
to skitter against Dad’s homemade wire feeders,
to strip dark fuzz of peanut coats
as I thumb loose tops of eggs,
trim Sunday’s veg.
A tiny intimacy. I am noticing these lately,
listening to a couple of magpies sing –
the joy to live;
to stand at the window (picture frame of frost
while the dryer rumbles, the heating hums on and off)
and watch the bluetits hang
upside down – perky acrobats,
white cheeks full with the bulge of seed,
skin back bark from the evergreen –
to watch each short hop and wing-twitch return
into the ivy, the warm home; into love, and feel
very briefly healed.
First Date
Singe of blue Colgate
at the back of a tongue.
Perfume top-notes
tremble in peach and freesia
on the underside of a wrist.
Dress blown tight against
the loop of a waist.
Red crepe clings
like fingers; long
on the inside of a thigh.
Hands unplait, press themselves
into the hollow of a back.
Form a mouth to fit
the silver oval
of a slow-opening zip.
The Story of Menstruation
Abdomen aching
underneath
cheap underwear elastic.
The clot of fresh death
cradled in the cotton,
the pulp a rusty red-brown.
Not dead – unmade;
faceless, nameless,
everyone a hint, a ‘what if’,
a cling of him.
I think of them.
Wonder who would have got what,
who came from where.
Every time, a prayer
for their arrival:
implore into frigid bathroom air,
notice the house plant
droops and rots, neglected.
Every time, a prayer –
yet saddened by my imagining;
shame at the spurt,
the scarlet mess
that marbles pink the water
in the toilet bowl.
Blood drops bud tiny hearts –
hot blooms, lost
up the lime-scaled U-bend.
………………..
Betty Doyle is a poet from Liverpool, England. Her writing has been published in both the UK and abroad, and she was most recently longlisted for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Prize. This month, her poems will appear in the Give Poetry a Chance anthology. She is currently studying for a Ph.D in Creative Writing, researching the topic of infertility in women’s poetry.
Twitter: @betty_poet