I sit at my machine
Hourlong beside me, Vera, aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.
Her boy, she hopes, will prove
Unlike his father in the act of love.
Twelve children are too many for her taste.
She looks sidelong, blue-eyed,
And tells a girlish story of a bride
With the sweet licence of Arabian queens.
Her child, she says, saw light
Minute for minute, nine months from the night
The mother first lay in her lover’s arms.
She says a friend of hers
Is a man’s mistress who gives jewels and furs
But will not have her soft limbs cased in stays.
I open my small store
And tell of a young delicate girl, a whore,
Stole from her mother many months ago.
Fate made the woman seem
To have a tiger’s loveliness, to gleam
Strong and fantastic as a beast of prey.
I sit at my machine.
Hourlong beside me, Vera, aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.
20.2.17