What I Wanted, by Clare O'Brien

A Little Night Music, by Dorothea Tanning (USA) 1943

What I Wanted
 
What I wanted was the sun: 
last night she pulled it up the stairs, 
too heavy to survive for long.
 
This house plays sounds. The howling of a dog, 
too quiet to be real. A shuffling, voices, once a sneeze.
 
She will not let me go outside.
Her hair is up. Her eyes are down, 
a girl made utterly of No.
 
Something moving in another room.  A child, 
exclaiming. A sentence, cut off halfway through.
 
My skin is icing over. Why
have they undressed me while I slept?
I cannot feel the warmth of day.
 
Footsteps up the stairs. A soft wind, moving slowly
in the shadows.  The open door is streaming gold.
 
Her ribbons trail like shrivelled stems. 
The sunflower is withering,
and what I wanted was the sun.

Clare O'Brien

Previously PR to a politician and PA to a rock star, Clare is now trying to finish her first novel somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in magazines including Mslexia, Northwords Now, The London Reader, Lunate, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Cabinet of Heed, Nightingale & Sparrow and in anthologies from The Emma Press and Hedgehog Poetry.