Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – St Rose of Lima’s Revenge by Geraldine Clarkson

At a rough-backed hour, wound round with olive

light, the pink-cheeked would-be anchorite

slides past date palms and scarlet

trumpet lilies in the colonial garden, intent

on the far spinney, where wiry trees like acolytes

surround a simple hut her heart always skips to reach.

Holy time, before the porcelain-jowled suitors

(damn them!) begin to queue,

their arms and brows pale-as-the-dough

which Madre leaves in the sideways sun

to rise. Their insect-voices urgent and ‘mi-querido’-ing

as they bend low to moan her name.

Always always she is called back just when

hermano Sun peeks up to play, called back

along the manicured paths, the geometric beds.

Called back from the bosky place, cloaked in verde

and all alone with the Belovedexpected. Called in

by a maid as ‘Señor So-and-So is waiting (and his

father is so importante, pretty Rosita)’

She makes lace, and takes stupendous blooms

to market, to support the house, ‘though many in the city

are much worse-off, Mami’. Some of these she brings

to her room, to rinse and bind till nightfall. Then,

though drooping, keeps vigil, to cultivate that sweet edge

of encounter, and grow—oleander-like—glossy with blessing.

This siesta-time, she flits again—lizards skid

on scalding sand—down to the cool grotto, for an hour

in eucalyptus and blueberry, till, again, some

Rafael or Gregorio in the lobby, and oh, the slippery grasping

insistence when you are so spent and your legs and arms so limp

and the cushions in the parlour so soft and grateful.

Ah, but she’ll show them. She plucks two pods as she passes in

at the kitchen door, scores their seams, then draws moist flesh

and virgin seeds across her eyelids, and cheeks,

like a society lady’s brightener, and they begin

to smart and swell. ‘Ah, my Rosa at last!’ her mother turns,

then gasps, at Rosa’s eyes dancing and red, the perfect skin

puckering into pustules, fresh chilli juice dripping

at her fingertips. The suitors look, and look away. But then (covertly)

look again.

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