St. Hilda Home

by Julie Corbett
The Write Idea
Honorable Mention, June 2010
Judged by Fiona Sampson


Sunday and another visit; Daffodils
the first cut from our garden. A car
journey and we travel across the city,
not away from the suburbs. Duty
calling from my father’s past. We
arrive two hours after lunch. Time
to take afternoon tea. I sit in the quiet
lounge waiting to hear if I am known
or recalled. Grandmother formed
memories too fragile in her later years
only the past thoughts of the strong arms
of lovers and the names of her children
keep her graceful hands and eyes from
falling closed and still in the day now.


Quiet, intelligent, thoughtful. Don’t like the use of passive tense in lines 8/9 – if you could change to the more straightforward “whether she knows or recalls me” it would release the poem up a level, make it lose its slight mannered-ness. --Fiona Sampson