Cover

The Other Country

CAROL ANN DUFFY

PICADOR

Originally

We came from our own country in a red room

which fell through the fields, our mother singing

our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.

My brothers cried, one of them bawling Home,

Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,

the street, the house, the vacant rooms

where we didn’t live any more. I stared

at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.

All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,

leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue

where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.

Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,

leading to unimagined, pebble-dashed estates, big boys

eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.

My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth

in my head. I want our own country, I said.

But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change,

and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only

a skelf of shame. I remember my tongue

shedding its skin like a snake, my voice

in the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only think

I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space

and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?

strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.

In Mrs Tilscher’s Class

You could travel up the Blue Nile

with your finger, tracing the route

while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.

Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.

That for an hour, then a skittle of milk

and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.

A window opened with a long pole.

The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.

The classroom glowed like a sweet shop.

Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley

faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.

Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found

she’d left a good gold star by your name.

The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.

A xylophone’s nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed

from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs

hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,

followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking

away from the lunch queue. A rough boy

told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared

at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.

A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,

fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her

how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,

then turned away. Reports were handed out.

You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,

as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

Sit at Peace

When they gave you them to shell and you sat

on the back-doorstep, opening the small green envelopes

with your thumb, minding the queues of peas, you were