The Importance of Being Earnest
by Jeanette Burton — The Friday Poem on 12/04/2024
This is a poem where shape, form and meaning come together. It’s a tall oblong, with lines in twos, like rows of people. These couplets also reflect mother and daughter together upstairs in a theatre (near the top/beginning of the poem), perhaps in the circle, while the father (alone) is far below. If that’s him. Can it really be him? It can. He’s in the stalls, “the third row”, and that’s confirmed as we approach the third stanza from the bottom/end, where we’re about to conclude on a single line (the father on his own) with mother and daughter waving down to him. But then we zoom back up to another version of him, this time “in the gods”, because we’ve entered the realm of metaphor and he’s the one merrily waving down. We’re in heaven.
The Importance of Being Earnest
There in the audience, my mother and me,
lights yet to be dimmed, unwrapping
Starburst, getting the rustling over before
the start, the curtains opening, the actors
taking centre stage. That’s when we spot him.
My dad. Or more precisely, my dad’s double,
same profile, greying hair, blue bomber jacket.
Look! That chap is the absolute spit of your dad!
Because there’s no way it’s him. He doesn’t
have a ticket, only ever offers to play taxi driver,
giving us a lift, then snoozing in the car or sloping
off to McDonald’s for a double cheeseburger.
If it’s not him, it’s his doppelganger or his ghost,
my mum whispers with a note of real concern
in her voice and I think of The X-Files episode,
the one where Scully sees her father before
the phone call to tell her he’s dead. We examine
this man, this imposter father in the stalls
until finally he turns, smiles and waves up to us.
It is dad! we exclaim, breathing a sigh of relief.
Too cold to wait in the car, he tells us afterwards,
decided to get himself a ticket in the third row.
We laugh, but then I think of the future, near,
far, whenever, watching another Wilde
in another theatre where I will see him again
in the circle, or up in the gods, and I will want
him to turn, smile, wave down to me forever.
Jeanette Burton is a poet and English teacher from Belper in Derbyshire. She is also a tutor with The Writing School. Her poetry has been published by The Emma Press and Candlestick Press, and has appeared in Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Dreich and Artemis. She was awarded first place in the McLellan Poetry Prize 2021, the Ware Poetry Prize 2022, and the PPP Poetry Competition 2023. Her pamphlet What is this, a family outing? was shortlisted for the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition 2021 and the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2023/24. She was shortlisted for the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2023.
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