Winter here is the afternoon wind
Rolling my sleeves down
While the shadow slides the plimsoll line
Higher up the palace.
We edge to the end of Eddie’s tables,
Grey after half past one,
And begin on the restaurant farther east
Where Summer visits until three.
Electricians have taught corners
To play cat’s cradle with swags of cable
Where the bright streets meet the shadowed ones.
Overhead, long-legged aerials swarm.
Left and right down the steep streets
Is what Homer, colour-blind in the mind’s eye,
Called Burgundy: the Curaçao-dark sea.
And in Upper Barracca among the windy leaves
The sky hangs ripe enough to pick.
© 2000 Sarah Lawson, published in Twelve Scenes of Malta (Hearing Eye, 2000)
Picture 10426465, Mary Evans / Grenville Collins Postcard Collection
Sarah Lawson is a poet and translator. Born in Indianapolis in 1943, she has spent most of her adult life in London. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and in her collections Below the Surface and All the Tea in China. She has published three poetry pamphlets with Hearing Eye: Down Where the Willow Is Washing Her Hair, Friends in the Country and Twelve Scenes of Malta, and a collection of haiku, The Wisteria’s Children. In prose she has published A Fado for my Mother, and a memoir about Poland, The Ripple Effect. She has translated works from French, Spanish and Dutch, and is probably the only person to have translated both Christine de Pisan and Jacques Prévert. Her play, Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, was performed at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre. Her latest translation from French is the story of a Bengali girl who refused to get married at the age of 11, The Strength to Say No by Rekha Kalindi. Other recent works are a novel, The Bohemian Pirate, and a collection of essays about Gone with the Wind, The GWTW Fortnight.
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