DOLL

My little princess.
My china doll with your
peachy skin and
golden hair.
In pink frills
I dressed you up,
combed you and curled you.
Made you into
my special pet,
my little angel,
to be loved and cherished.
My creation.
My little girl.

But all the time
you were making up yourself,
getting ready to
smash the porcelain,
and break out
to become
the creation you had
already made up
even before you painted
and inked your pearly skin,
combed your hair straight,
and gelled it
into jagged spikes
with a pink splash.
Shockingly, piercing the past,
you broke out into your future.

For you were never a princess,
never a doll,
and most of all, little girl,
you were never mine,
never mine to mould.

First published by ITWOW, She Did It Anyway Anthology, May 2015

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Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. Her poem ‘A Rose For Gaza’ was shortlisted for the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today’ competition in October 2014 and has since been published and reprinted in anthologies by Vending Machine Press, Weasel Press and CTU among others. Poems have also recently been included in several anthologies including Harbinger Asylum’s ‘A Moment To Live By’, Stacey Savage’s ‘We Are Poetry an Anthology of Love poems’, ITWOW, ‘She Did It Anyway’, Community Arts Ink’s ‘Reclaiming Our Voices’  and a number of online and print journals.