1939: A Refugee Describes Her New Situation
By Imogen Forster
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
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This manor house: cold, the flagstones damp
till late afternoon, when logs are brought in in baskets, never enough, never quite dry. Their dog, Bruno, bigger than I like, clumsy, bumps into people. The colour of the old rug he sleeps on. They feed him meat from the table. The twice-a-year emptying of cabin trunks, clothes rustling out of their long rest, camphor. Moths, rubbed to a silver smear on your finger. Talcum powder, the baby unwrapped, weighed in a canvas sling, the oily spring of the scale. The aunts, their black dresses, their workbags. They collect dry seeds in the garden to make lavender water, but something’s missing and it turns sour, has to be thrown away. Drawing room hyacinths, a drop of sherry in a glass, inky leavings. His special cigarettes, somewhere between cow dung and fresh grass. In the scullery, the names, the labels: Finings, Size, Black Lead, Caustic Soda, Salts of Sorrel. The purposes, the antidotes. Like prayers. |
Imogen Forster lives and works in Edinburgh. Her pamphlet, The Grass Boat, was published by Mariscat Press in 2021. The title poem appears in Best Scottish Poems 2021, an online anthology from the Scottish Poetry Library. Her full collection, with the provisional title Adverse Camber, is under consideration with an Edinburgh publisher. She has an MA in writing poetry from Newcastle University.