Sunshine Rose - White Carnation

Still sleepy with humid heat
she reaches for the kitchen cupboard,
another aspirin to dull the pain.
Damp patches beneath her arms tinged with effort
and over-permed hair that loops above eyes
pale blue, and large as loneliness.

The air stale with school-bags, polished shoes
and rubbish-bins full of vegetable peelings.
Mum was an ordinary women,
he made her ordinary,
with second-hand slippers flapping on and off at her heels,
she brings the food and wipes away the traces.
Plunging headlong into the beating mixmaster would be
a tragic way for her to die perhaps.

So she stands-belly bulging
set to a sink of Palmolive bubbles,
day after day to look so pale,
so busted swimming the waves
yet never quite coming to the surface.
He enters silent and earth-stained,
with peasant arms he snakes her heavy waist
and gives her a large white carnation as an apology.

Sunshine Rose

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/white-carnation/