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  • In Retirement
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In Retirement

Elma Mitchell

Widowed of my own image
That shone from fellow faces
I watch from envious window
The men whose energies at morning
Are sucked towards the safe corporeal city.

Young men who run on rails, bereft
Of personal intention, don’t condemn
The older one immobile in a chair!
You are the playthings: I the pioneer
Of white Antarctica, bloodless and bare.


Elma Mitchell

from People etcetera: poems new & selected (Peterloo Poets, 1987)

Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Harry Chambers.

Tags:

ageing loneliness retirement windows
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Elma Mitchell1919 - 2000

Lanarkshire-born Elma Mitchell went south with a scholarship to Oxford, and remained in England, working as a librarian for the BBC, and latterly as a freelance writer and translator. Her compassionate insights into people’s lives were collected in four...
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