parcel office in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
I’m in a very bored queue, waiting
to collect a packet from a bookshop in
Minnesota, which the postman claims
that he couldn’t fit through my letterbox –
the packet, I mean, not Minnesota.
I am not a Yorkshireman. Neither was I
a Yorkshireman when I joined this bloody queue.
As I’m a woman, this may be obvious to some.
There are some Yorkshiremen in this queue,
they don’t move, much. I hope the Minnesota bookshop
have sent me a book about Louise Nevelson,
who is not a sculptress, but a sculptor.
She is not a Yorkshireman either, though
as a child she emigrated from Russia to New York.
I don’t know if she ever made it to Minnesota.
My parents never emigrated, they never stopped
long enough in one place: Aden, Aldershot,
Berlin, Carthage, Tripolitania, Zanzibar.
This queue hasn’t moved. You do have to
stop moving to become an emigrant, who
comes from somewhere, or an immigrant
who comes to somewhere. However, I am still
not a Yorkshireman, still waiting in this
queue which with a burst of optimism rare,
for Huddersfield, has just moved on two whole steps.
I am still waiting for my book from Minnesota, about a
sculptor who may or may not, have been to Minnesota.
She has certainly never been to Yorkshire.
The queue is in Yorkshire, so is the book, I
live in hope. I’m very interested in Sculpture.
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