Imagining an impossible encounter with herself as a child, the poet discreetly evokes the girl’s intense life
If I Were to Meet
If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood running
with slipping shoulder-straps
and half-plaited hair
beside a brown expanse
of memorising water
and the mellow faces of wooden houses
half-hidden by a weave
of coconut, mango, guenip trees
Related: Poem of the week: Weeping Woman by Grace Nichols
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