| Emily-Anne picks up her home:
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| A tattered book, a toothless comb,
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| () A yellowed letter singing praises to her charms.
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| She packs away her memories,
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| With the bottle that brings ease,
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| In the battered bag she clutches In her arms.
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| Raucous rooks disturb the northern morn,
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| From the trees outside the town.
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| A goods-train shakes the railway bridge’s dust
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| On her «Daily Mirror «eiderdown.
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| And the mill-girls shudder from their sleep,
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| Dreams of princes dying with the dawn.
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| Clogs that clatter on the cobbled road
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| Warn her that another day is born.
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| Cockney sparrows squabble constantly,
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| Scrabble for the crumbs around her feet:
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| She breaks the barren bread of poverty,
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| Shares it with the sorrows of the street.
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| And the pigeons on the pedestals
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| Desecrate the sleeping statues stones,
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| They’re immune to authority,
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| She sees the time has come to go.
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| Finches fidget in the hawthorn hedge,
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| Bees desert the Kentish country lane,
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| She reads the signs and searches for a barn,
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| To shelter from the coming of the rain.
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| And as she huddles in among the straw,
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| She feels his gentle hand caress her waist,
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| When the drumming of the raindrops cease,
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| The fiction of his face begins to fade.
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| Seagulls circle over lazy waves,
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| Seaweed scents the sunlit Sussex sand,
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| She holds a shell between her fingertips:
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| Wrinkled like the skin upon her hand.
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| Laughing, shouting kids on skipping feet,
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| With their spades and buckets scurry by.
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| While the ocean of her loneliness
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| Stretches to the margins of the sky. |