Lorraine Singh

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Manta Ray

She’s dead weight round her mother’s neck
an enormous ungainly girl
as heavy as a Cathedral Bell
who licks every new person she meets.
Now she’s considered a danger
(to herself or others) she’s out
in the garden barefoot in the Hellebores
and her strange songs have attracted
wild geese who all wear identical fixed
expressions. From where she stands
she can see the deep blue ocean
just as Pat painted it in 1969.
She feels as solitary as a giant Manta Ray
who ploughs his way across
lumpy tidal oceans to meet his own kind.