A wishful thinking editor re-spelt
my name with a T and changed a poem’s
final words from ‘a tramp woman nurses
an infant/under a tumbling sky’ to
‘under a trembling sky’. Humbling to find
an editor’s chance(?) choice of epithet
happier than mine own! Mine was truer.
One winter night, I was changing trains at Crewe
and a red faced fellow traveller
sang, “…not her beauty alone. ‘Twas the truth
in her eye made me love the Rose of Tralee”.
His pale wife shivered by their cardboard case.
His breath condensed like the whitest of roses.