Sometimes when I'm making beds
or pressing hot creases into sheets
like a young girl's secrets wrapped in paper,
while the smell of heated cotton warms the room;
sometimes I think, were it not for the sounds
of cars outside, and the television sets
like squat black beetles in each of the rooms,
the vacuum cleaner I drag behind me
like a reluctant dog being walked;
were it not for these -
I could be an African servant girl
brought back two centuries ago
from Jamaican plantations by a trader,
my master, his mulatto child in fact.
The view over Lyme bay, misty now,
is much the same as it must have been then,
the neatly trimmed hedges and lawns,
lavender beds and the red-earthed driveway
curling around flowerbeds like a slowworm, sleepy
in the heat; the rooms with their polished dressers,
curved legs and white lace mats, the sounds of birds,
the clock in the hall.
Little has changed here, up at the big house
with me, the servant girl, being treated jolly well
having praise heaped on me like spoonfuls of sugar
for washing clothes, or folding sheets well,
while I make beds and think I know
how the magpie they keep in the garden
wrapped in wire must feel,
bruising its black and white wings against the cage,
pretending I was born for this,
smiling and dusting and cleaning white people's rooms,
with the smell of hot cotton warming my skin,
pressing hot creases like frown lines into sheets.
Louisa Adjoa Parker is a poet and black history writer. Her collection Salt-sweat and Tears was published to critical acclaim by Cinnamon Press in 2007. Her poem 'Rag Doll' was highly commended by the Forward Prize 2008.
