Milk Face Poem by Grahame Lockey

Milk face, nuzzling a nipple from a pillow. It's not there.
You rub your face in bib. Only bib. Blanket. Only blanket.
Screwing up your pale paper face, you make a big noise.

In the run, where the scrub took on the concrete once
and won, where trees and tall grasses grow through
old pushchairs and bike wheels, a cockerel steps

over unpecked grain to the upturned pail it crows on.
For once it's dawn. Your eyes stop on me, by accident,
then slip off, your croissant arms, short in the sleeve,

flap about, hard to put down, your legs kick out
as if something were crawling from the blur the world is
so you open your neat, toothless mouth. And smile.

I smile back. You send the chickens running
with your squawk, cluck and chuck up. Then bawl.


(February 1997, Lamma Island)