Guy Simser

All Saint’s Eve

As dusk crawls to the ramshackle porch of her sun bleached clapboard home, six-year old Cinderella with old Christmas tinsel for crown, sits on her prat on dead grass, madly buries her face again and again, in fallen leaves arm-raked between her frayed leggings…

from the farm gate
a cacophony
a horsecart of mummers

…sitting bolt upright and with racing voice she speaks theatrically to a host of costumed coots until one by one, she curtly purges them with dismissive gestures of her hazelnut twig wand even as they genuflect, perhaps in the act of seeking a presumed favour of this naïf, who will be goaded on, again, this long bonfire night for that favour by someone from behind a mask: someone she knows…

dawn    musk in the mist    drifting