Nov 14th – Silly Lily

Late – late +10 – prompted by here.

Dublin

It was the other girls
who gave her the name:
a nickname, a name made up

if not to hurt, exactly,
but to mock, to tease,
to provoke

a reaction.
And she would always react,
at first, to the teasing,

the name calling,
the hard sharp assonance
of the spiky ‘i’.

Sometimes, at first,
she tried to become the name
they made for her,

the flower fool,
play up, play dumb,
play stupid;

but they took no notice, or
laughed even more:
laughing at, not with.

In time, though,
she flowered into her name,
her real name,

and the old friends dropped
like autumn petals
and blew away,

and the name got lost
among the weeds
of the past.

Sometimes though,
she thinks back
to when she was rhyme,

and the name they gave her
freed her from
the patterns of ordinary,

and let her walk,
for minutes at a time,
in another girl’s shoes.