Fairy Tale Life C.18 September 2008 Poem by Margaret Alice

Marching everywhere, wearing military shoes,
knowing every gesture I made conveyed infor-
mation, under constant observation by KGB
spies and enemy groups

By the time I went to varsity, I had become a
Russian spy, from the residence to the campus,
never alone, spies watching with binoculars –
when I started translating

I became Saartjie Bauman, twelve years old,
posing as an adult, all work was just a game,
underneath I was an international agent
masquerading as an interpreter

Later I played I was a poet and dug up all my
writings of the past twenty years, never taken
seriously, my life being a fairy tale…