After The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
When she said ‘nobody wants me’ and
‘why is it always so cold here?’, and
‘I have spoken, all depart!’
I wanted to take her dancing in predawn fog.
Wanted to watch her downturned mouth for hours
for signs of spring, paint her sour-milk cheeks
with moorland rain and heather
and wait for them to bloom red.
I wanted to gift her sycamore keys
for her many locked doors, shock her
with the snap of a winter twig –
seemingly brittle as her unloved bones –
to show her the way it is shot through with green
at the marrow.
