Janice Windle Poems

On Spending an Exceedingly Long Time in Debenham’s Lingerie Department Buying Bigger Underwear After the Usual Christmas Indulgence Despite Dónall’s Kind Assurances That It is AS HE LIKES IT!

I’m busy in the changing room
choosing bras, to fit my bigger,
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This poem was inspired by the painting by Rocco Marconi (active in Venice 1504 - 1526) in the Academia Art Gallery in Venice, where I drew the expressive faces of the onlookers to the drama of Christ rescuing the adultress from the harsh law which would have had her stoned to death.

'I am an exotic gift, pearls in braided honey hair.
I gather my coral wrappings about my satin shoulders,
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This poem was written in the first couple of weeks after I met Dónall and it's based on my mishearing of the word 'modulation' - the word he used for the easy transmuting of one mode, one mood, into another, which the two of us experienced in our communicaions with each other.

I think my new word, 'magellation' means the magic of easy communication though words and touch, which we have found with each other from the start. This is the poem:
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You are old, Mrs. Windle, the schoolchildren cried,
and you really are not very cool.
Yet you write and you paint and you teach on the side -
do you think that you should be in school?
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Am I no more than a mirror?
I reflect.

I reflect pale Narcissus.
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Talking over our lives, as you do with a new love, I told Dónall about my troubled pre-pubescence, when I was convinced that I was abnormal and that I would never grow breasts like Marilyn Monroe's or even like Christine B's who was in my class at primary school and was an 'early developer'. This poem grew out of our conversation........

One - two - three!
Christine B
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It was a summer's day when we first met
the memories are clear - I won't forget -
traffic noise, new faces, beer and sweat -
that summer day when you and I first met.
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Meeting, we touched
touching, clung to each other
never to let go.
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Fourth of July in Shakespeare’s Stratford -
we’ve driven up north from south of Watford
and patiently we join the traffic’s crawl
past rotund families, nose-deep in ice-cream cones
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