THIS witty analysis of a well-recognised social situation comes from Annemarie Austin's latest collection, Track (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95).
Born in Devon and brought up in the Somerset Levels and Weston-super-Mare, she has been widely published since winning the Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition in 1980.
THIRD PARTY
I have been that third party:
the one facing the two
across the tennis net,
the one brought along
to screen the other two from view,
maybe at a party.
I have too often been that third,
misreading the signals,
believing our triangle equilateral
when I was the obtuse one
all the time,
my spread-out screen Japanese
with an elegant arc of gooseberry
not plum blossom.
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