Bleak
Jo Gerrard
She wears cream colored shoes
With white socks in the dead of winter
Because she says
Her soul leaks out when she wears the black ones
And anyway, she is old-
Too old to worry about being fashionable
But she was old.
Long before it was time to be young
She remembers breathing in coke,
Another miner thing her husband used to bring home
(like bruises for both of them and mad irish talk
or union men)
before ittoo khis life
but these are things she never speaks of
her sorrows are hers to bear in silence
old limbs demurely covered
by patience
and black dust.
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