Fran Skating on the Manor Pond

The poem below was a runner-up in the Exeter Poetry Prize 1998 and later published in Making Worlds: One Hundred Contemporary Women Poets, Wirral: Headland, 2003. (ed. Myra Schneider, Dilys Wood & Gladys Mary Coles). It also appears in Tessitura (Shearsman).
I wrote the poem after my grandmother told me stories about her siblings and their Victorian rural childhoods spent in Devon.

1894: Fran Skating on the Manor Pond

She skates over and around its frozen surface,

then spins a pencil-pirouette,

muffs blue-heat her hands

and from her waist a scarlet whirl of skirt.

In hazy light veins seem to break in olive eyes

as the blades of her boots refract the scratching ice

and under setting sun

her shadow is half a pulsating heart.

Ida, in the kitchen sits and snips

the corners of the paper folds.

Brittle like ice.

Deft, her fingers snip and snap then

rippling like a fan the row of skating dolls

holding hand by hand.

Robert, in the other room

turns a page.

His book about the Ministry

is a weight upon his mind.

His sisters are making their mark;

each enacts a secret lore

on a slated sheet of white,

figure skating on the land of open-space

and inscribing a serrated pictograph.

Even the tiny feet of each minute dancing doll

are chipped away to equip them with the sharpest razor cut.

Julie Sampson