Hester Wardle:Poem

I love receiving gifts, especially from ghosts.
The poem below was, I believe, a gift.

It wrote like a tap.

I love it.
Thanks Hester...





Hester Wardle
mistress of the house
a house alive with sunflowers
and nothing else


walks softly with scissors


Over there by the clock
by the clock without a beat
lies a mound of blue bound manuals
bought when Wardle's coins flowed

Manuals with elaborate pictures
drawn by men in London and Bath
one signed 'with love and appreciation'
name indecipherable
'1871'


And on this mound of manuals
sits propped a lonely lady doll
her auburn hair ratted entwisted* and quarrelling with bugs
runs alive
swarming her broken back
and
ribbons, once lilac and smooth, now
ripple through the little nest

The doll's porcelain face was, many years ago, awash with Hester's fingermarks
but now
now at the houses* end
rests like one of Father's unwanted monuments
cracked, shot and beggarly
yet as a stick of sunlight shoots through another split in the whey-faced wall
it shows up a hint
a living hint
of a milky tear set like stone in dolly's squashed eyes
Tilly Tilly was once adored...

Hester with snapping scissors in hands
and webs on her skirts
sits.



There are deliberate grammatical errors in this...
*'houses'. I don't know why, but it felt right.

Entwisted is an archaic word.