Carol Ann Duffy - Penelope lyrics

At first, I looked along the road hoping to see him saunter home among the olive trees, a whistle for the dog who mourned him with his warm head on my knees. Six months of this and then i noticed that whole days had pa**ed without my noticing. I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread, thinking to amuse myself, but found a lifetime's industry instead. I sewed a girl under a single star—cross-stitch, silver silk— running after childhood's bouncing ball. I chose between three greens for the gra**; a smoky pink, a shadow's grey to show a snapdragon gargling a bee I threaded walnut brown for a tree, my thimble like an acorn pushing up through umber soil. Beneath the shade I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace with heroism's boy and lost myself completely in a wild embroidery of love, lust, lessons learnt; then watched him sail away into the loose gold stitching of the sun. And when the others came to take his place, disturb my peace, I played for time. I wore a widow's face, kept my head down, did my work by day, at night unpicked it. I knew which hour of the dark the moon would start to fray, I stitched it. Grey threads and brown pursued my needle's leaping fish to form a river that would never reach the sea. I tried it. I was picking out the smile of a woman at the centre of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content, most certainly not waiting, when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the door. I licked my scarlet thread and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle's eye once more.