Silly music plays and a wide red smile
clashes with a lurid multicoloured wig.
Cartwheels and tumbles and a never-ending
stream of scarves from the entertainer.
The audience laughs and claps in delight.
A baby bird taps at its reflection
in a glass door. The entertainment ends,
“Thanks everyone, half an hour ’til dinner.”
Those who can walk, creak to a stand
and shuffle home to their rooms.
Others wait to lean on the staff or rev up
their little scooters. Others are asleep.
Five pm dinners and naps and drool
and nappies are the standard here.
The years reversing, the memories gone:
“What is that?” A pointed finger. “A magpie love”
Outside, a student rummages through
a skip full of the remnants of a life
once downsized from a four bed house
to fit in a single room. Now binned.
The student’s hair is lilac, she is sorrowful
for the loss of an unknown life, but likes the
free recycled furniture, to think that lives live on
in the velvet and walnut items she takes.
Lilac hair befriended the workers months ago.
They let her take the stuff. What do they care?
It saves phone calls, effort and money. Now
she finds a perfect vintage lamp, timber and mustard.
Satisfied, she climbs out with her good find.
Walking back to the front doors she waves
at the worker she considers the oldest, but who
is still thirty years younger than the most youthful inmate.
A light spattering of water descends so lilac hair
waits by the front door with her lamp.
She considers acting out the famous singing in the rain scene
chuckling softly, thinking those inside would get the joke.
A glint catches her eye; a sparkling figure gliding through
the main corridor. A skeleton in a silver ball-gown,
her posture as straight as a queen, waving benevolently to
those she passes, waiting for forgotten reasons on hallway seats.
The rain eases. The girl walks her new lamp home,
hoping she wears sequins and satins in a nursing home
seventy years from now. She wonders what the lady had been.
An opera singer? Philanthropist? Housewife?
Tiffany Karlsson
Canberra, ACT
