Old Woman's Bath Time Ritual Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Four inches up the bath the water sits
Three towels laid out,
One on the floor in case her feet should slip.

He helps her in. She's eighty and his wife
His patience, like his hair, is getting thin.
They do not speak, that squeezed out long ago
Like a dry sponge that's filling up with sand

She curls her worn hands on alternate taps
Staring at nothing, leaning forward
Like an old horse, over a fence.

Her wrinkled haunches sag.
The belly that held his children,
An empty swinging bag.
The breasts that once delighted,
Drop to their puckered walnut nipple stops.

He fills a plastic jug, anoints her shoulders,
Soaps the day's detritus from her flanks

The tide mark's low.
She has inched from chair to bath
In tentative slippers propped upon a stick.

The plug removed, she stands like a steaming dray-horse
Waiting the master's 'hup'
Is hoisted up on the scaffold of his arms.