Growth/Decay
Sorry is a swollen word and it fills my stomach till I’m
throwing up into the dandelion patch outside the back door.
Summer is lying lazy on the hills like a leopard sprawled in a tree and
I have never felt so much like a cornered animal.
That’s the end, I write. And I sign off. And then it doesn’t end.
Golden hour gone sour
me wishing I could spit my grief into the gin-bottle
broken glass on the beach. I don’t
cut my hair for weeks, my skin is messy with spots and I am always hanging
hanging, hoping for a fall.
Suddenly it’s July, premature and full of rot, and they up my mother’s pain meds.
My legs are even longer than they were last year;
white against the black dock as my school-friends and I swim in the freezing loch.
Isn’t this fun? And I grin at them.
No, this isn’t fun. This is pain, controlled.
A woman comes to the house and talks about the nicest ways our world could end.
Spilling out the back door into the sunlight I am swallowed by the furious hum of bees.
I am seventeen, I am seventeen and I am building a boat
because I can feel the flood coming in my back teeth
and I did not come this far just to drown.
It’s a classical summer; black flies and lemonade.
I think, Maycomb, Prairie, Watership Down.
Upstairs in a darkened room something silently grows
and downstairs, in the light, we are blown apart.
Daisy Harris
Daisy Harris Poetry 