20-07-2025
The Sunday Poem, by Fiona Kidman
The children's toys
This morning I took the children's toys
from the bottom of the linen cupboard
where they have been stored
forty or so years and transferred
them to the tin shed that has been cleared
by the son whose toy train
is tangled in the plastic rubbish sack along
with his sister's dolls and the painted head
of Josephine, my own doll
handed on. There was that afternoon
on the farm when my mother walked
up the road with a bulge
beneath her coat, and inside was nestled
this make-believe human I slept with for years.
She took away night terrors and the fear
that the devil would rise
through the floor during darkness
when I was sleeping. Oh Josephine
on this sunny bright morning,
the agapanthus a torrent of blue
beside the path, it seems little to ask
that the children be kept safe
now and forever, near and far
away, given endless days just like today.
Taken with kind permission by the newly published latest collection The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman (Otago University Press, $40), available in bookstores nationwide.
