Martina Evans is a poet and novelist. Her fourth book of poems Facing the Public was a TLS Book of the Year and won the Piero Ciampi International Poetry Prize for 2011. Petrol, a book-length prose poem is published by Anvil (October 2012).

Gazebo

Gazebo was the word my mother
used to describe a mad exhibitionist
or a queer hawk. For example,
so-and-so was going around like a
right gazebo. Naturally I imagined
a gazebo had legs and travelled so
I was surprised to see my first one
on an English village green, going
nowhere, the wedding couple
toasting each other under its rippling
blue and white canopy as cricket bats
smacked slowly in the heat. My mother
grew up near landed gentry and
the gazebos hidden in their walled gardens
must have entered her language
like escaped seeds,
growing into wild tramps
that straggled along the road,
on strange, overblown feet.