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Borderlands

 

You find the border suddenly, unawares,

It snakes through suburbs,

Attacks with its invisible line,

Spins you from one world to another.

 

I am born to the border.

One grandmother, stiff as a chapel pew,

Tiny sandwiches and pots of tea

With doilies. The other, fierce as 

A house held together by sound,

Reverberations of another place,

Pans bubbling on stoves, and sugary pies

Baked every Sunday after early Mass.

 

School trains me to be English,

Cool, detached,

Knowing the cutlery for every dish

We can’t afford,

Sends me to London with words I cannot say

Knowing their meaning only from my books,

Pronunciation can elude my tongue.

A tutor mocks,

Received pronunciation slices

Like a sword,

Another border.

 

Language is slippery.

When I come home,

A sharpened Southernness infects my speech,

But slips away, the old language returns,

The slightest lilt, and our instead of my,

Our world is plural,

Theirs singular.

 

Old haunts are threatening,

The new are strange,

My flattened vowels fall

Like insults on them,

Each one a label,

Marking me out, not one of us,

Not capable.

They flatten me to match my vowels,

Some borders are always closed.

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Helen Jones © 2024