Reading

In the gap between an English afternoon and evening,

we're let into the bookshop, leaving the dishevelled city

with its relentless pavements for the civilisation

of folding pine chairs and carpeting; books.

She enters to held breaths wall-to-wall. She's slight, tanned,

more this, less that than anyone expected, hair bright as a globe.

She shows slides: cooking monkey in Gambo, on a pirogue

up the Zaire river, getting stoned by children in Senegal.

But my eyes are on her more than the pictures. She brings me

the world on her feet, skin, breasts, in my own tongue.

It silences me, an islander holidaying on other islands;

Ibiza, Crete, Tenerife. A woman walking continents raises dust.

Willing to see more sense in a grain of desert sand

than in all of England, I queue for her book, her signature.

Meeting her eyes, I receive my blessing and leave smiling.

We all do. We have been saved: already we are less ordinary.

Mandy Sutter

Mandy's new novel, Stretching It, a light-hearted look at love, papier-mache and caring for an impossible parent, is available at Amazon UK