Mammy’s Dress
There’s comfort in the fading of her dress;
each picnic folded into each pelt
of rain that’s laundered it simple
like infinity accepted as true.
This dress dances on a woollen rope
strung between two silver birch.
The gap in the wall to the burn
(today it is full with trickle souls).
Mammy through a wicket on the left
with a thimble of child following –
all straight hair and playing mute.
Mammy chimes, the bairn laughs.
The wind picks up and catches
the dress, fills it up and up it flies
up above mammy then exhales
over her arms and her head and
her breasts and her hips and her legs.
Mammy and the bairn spin on the bank
for the rest of the afternoon, from blue
through red, to gold, to purple, to black
sky with its white eye and freckled belt.
(originally published in the anthology Marginalia Jerwood/Arvon, 2011)
Stevie Ronnie is a writer and artist based in Newcastle. His work, often collaborative and participatory in nature, spans art forms to produce pieces for publication, exhibition, installation and / or performance. Poems have appeared in UK, Irish and US publications including Anon, Ink Sweat & Tears, nthposition, The Penny Dreadful and The Common. In 2013 Stevie will undertake a month long residency in the Arctic Circle.
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