How Things Are On Thursday (2004)

What Happens To Women

It’s what happens to women, no matter who you are.
Divine inside? They’ll only see the face.
It’s coming, despite your warmth, your grit, your heart –
the sudden shift from beauty, to disgrace.
A light snapped off, and you’re gone.  You’re in the dark.
No-one can see you now. You are unglued,
for while you slept, the world took you softly apart.
Now man after man walks through the ghost of you.

On a morning like any other, she wakes to find
her lover moved out, and all her admirers gone
from her steps, as if with one breath, one mind,
they abandoned their roses there like skeletons.
A half-penned love note stutters towards the sea,
embarrassed, undoing its ‘love’, and ‘dear’, and ‘we’.

from How Things Are On Thursday © Ros Barber 2004

Poems: Liberation, Lafayette Super Eight, Green, Fish, Well, Pronoun, Soup, Who Forgets, He’d Push My Hands Together, Appointment, Waiting For Scott, Suffers At Sennen, Embassy Court (First Thought, Little Miss Bauhaus, The Babe, What Happens To Women, Refugees, Sunk, Goddess), Fecundity, BN1, Helping the Police with Their Enquiries, The Gentle Way, Missing the Opera with My Sister, Airtight, Old School Friends, I Filled the Bath with Coty L’Aimant, One Way of Falling, How Things Are On Thursday (How Things Are On Thursday, When Sleep is Dangerous, Where to Go, When She Pretends to be Swimming, What Gives, Who Marks Himself), The Dancer.