The Banana Raffle
Come to think of it, she didn't tell us
who'd got hold of the banana, or how,
or if a neighbourhood spiv was involved,
and we forgot to ask, shocked by the news
that at ten years old she'd never seen one.
She was still proud her class had raffled it
for the war effort, still slightly mournful
at missing out on the chance of a taste,
watching it turn black on her teacher's desk
long before they drew the winning ticket.
She wouldn't talk about gas masks, the Blitz,
the Doodlebugs, how they became V2s,
or how hope had turned gangrenous,
but she always recalled her fury
at the waste of bloody good food.
Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStance Press, he published his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, with Eyewear Books in 2017. More recent poems have been published in The Spectator, The New European and Stand.