Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.
You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
between us. Anchor. Kite.
I through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.
YOU ARE READING
AQA English GCSE Poetry Anthology
PoetryThe book of poems from both the Love and Relationships and the Power and Conflict spec of AQA GCSE English.
