Poem
Helen Dunmore
The Malarkey
The Malarkey
The Malarkey
Why did you tell them to be quietand sit up straight until you came back?
The malarkey would have led you to them.
You go from one parked car to another
and peer through the misted windows
before checking the registration.
Your pocket bulges. You’ve bought them sweets
but the mist is on the inside of the windows.
How many children are breathing?
The malarkey’s over in the back of the car.
The day is over outside the windows.
No street light has come on.
You fed them cockles soused in vinegar,
you took them on the machines.
You looked away just once.
You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.
You have been telling them for ever
Stop that malarkey in the back there!
Now they have gone and done it.
Is that mist, or water with breath in it?
© 2010, Helen Dunmore
From: www.poetrysociety.org.uk
Publisher: The Poetry Society, London
This poem won the National Poetry Competition 2009 first prize, which was awarded to Dunmore at a ceremony in London on 30 March 2010.
From: www.poetrysociety.org.uk
Publisher: The Poetry Society, London
Helen Dunmore
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)
Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire and studied at the University of York. She began to write poems as a child, and has published nine collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Glad of These Times (2007). Her second collection, The Sea Skater, won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; The Raw Garden was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and her collection of poems for childr...
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The Malarkey
Why did you tell them to be quietand sit up straight until you came back?
The malarkey would have led you to them.
You go from one parked car to another
and peer through the misted windows
before checking the registration.
Your pocket bulges. You’ve bought them sweets
but the mist is on the inside of the windows.
How many children are breathing?
The malarkey’s over in the back of the car.
The day is over outside the windows.
No street light has come on.
You fed them cockles soused in vinegar,
you took them on the machines.
You looked away just once.
You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.
You have been telling them for ever
Stop that malarkey in the back there!
Now they have gone and done it.
Is that mist, or water with breath in it?
From: www.poetrysociety.org.uk
This poem won the National Poetry Competition 2009 first prize, which was awarded to Dunmore at a ceremony in London on 30 March 2010.
The Malarkey
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