Here she comes
sailing cutty-sarked over garden walls,
in her wake
the hurdling O'Flahertys.
I catch her eyeing me in mid-passage,
here behind double glazing.
Her right cheek flush with her leading leg.
'Watcha think of this for aerial splits!'
is what the eye's not saying.
What it is saying is -
'I'm surprised you haven't hammered that window yet, old man.
This is our third time round!'
A mouthful of a glance,
and gone.
Hit-and-run.
Is this revenge
for our last encounter?
There she was, on her favoured lurking ground,
hunkered atop the high wall behind the house
and half-screened by a beech tree's summer droopery.
'Woo-woo!' goes she -
a velvet cooing
got, I know, by blowing
between cocked thumbs
into the echo-chamber of palms clasped loosely -
outlaw stuff.
It was aimed at me,
half-seen through the open kitchen door -
'Woo!'
'What's this? An owl in the afternoon? A drunken dove?
ETs in covert converse?
These were the sort of questions she was out to instil
into my fogeyed mind.
Ah, bird-girl home from the Antipodes,
how could you know
this grandad was in on the game -
taught it by the Tarzan of his tanglewood days.
Drying my hands of suds, two trial puffs,
then out it comes, sweet and low
as it used to, fifty years ago -
'Woooo!'
No answer.
Raise the fingers. Blow a higher note - a 'Weeee!'
Silence.
Try the opening bars of WALTZING MATILDA;
it was as near as I could get.
No reply.
No sign -
until today.
Here she comes again,
the ferocious O'Flahertys in
not pursuit, but tow.
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©Renate Mitchell. May not be reproduced in any form online or offline without explicit written permission.