Black Hole
It was a seaside town
the promenade candy-striped in colour, the long lawns of a Victorian park
lazy on the downstroke from sky to sea. Houses were penned in to fill
the wide streets, resting easy on their gardens like old men in deckchairs. In the houses
were families
swelling like bubbles under the fickle sun. And on the western shore of the town
there was a black hole.
Everybody in the town knew that the black hole was there
but it was easy to look at something else; the fairground stickiness of the pink blossoms
on the fruit-trees, the sailing boats waving their white flags against the petrol-coloured
water, the way the street-lamps were elegant like old-fashioned young women
dancing radium girls in the dusk.
You couldn’t ignore it all the time, of course
take the coast-road a little too far, and you could hear it:
an airy thunder, a slow, precarious waltz, heavy on the bass.
Too far, and you could see it hanging in the sky over the harbour
Vesta’s unblinking iris and the point of no return.
There were mothers who worried for their little ones
growing up too much like daddy. In high-ceilinged nurseries
they sat singing their accented folk-songs, and asking the black hole
to leave their bairn alone. When their wee one was grown they
wept to see them in the peaked cap that didn’t sit right yet
too charmed by the stars to see the burning nothing.
Out on the streets of the town the mothers waited, telling stories of
a sunny peace-time
and the dying star called love.
Daisy Harris
Daisy Harris Poetry 