The House Plant

She keeps it in the living room
next to the fire, quite safe from rain
or raucous winds and screened by curtains
from the uninvited sun; alive
but not allowed to grow.

For Alice too,
there was to be no flowering.
The seed of her was sown in stormy times:
the sky was somewhere bombs might fall from;
hostile sea too perilous to cross.

The world was never, as for some of us,
an orchard bulging with ripe fruit.
Her life’s work was the carving out
from it of some small place of calm
for her and those she loved.

True to that goal she rejects
and fears the Outside still. She cowers
in her carapace of cardigans;
the stillness of this safe,
constricted space a kind of victory. 

It did not ask to be protected.
In its sheltered spot, the leaves grow smaller,
folding in upon themselves.
‘Must be the draught,’ she said. I disagreed.
‘Let’s put it in the sun for once, before it dies.’