Your polished racehorse hair
leaves me churning with envy.
Mine, conversely, seems
To heave into acquiescence
and yet, when I look more closely
into the mirror there is a girl;

with sea matted hair
who runs at the tide edge
and makes rafts out of driftwood.

with yellow oat grass hair
who lingers with the hare
in the wild moor meadow.

with sand gritty desert hair
where the Pleiades shine
and illuminate her dark places.
who is beautiful.

Parting

No more sessions in front of the mirror
each morning before setting off for the office.
No need, any more, for those delicate adjustments,
those deft flourishes of brush and comb,
trying to keep the line straight,
some strands this way, some that.
“Now that you’re retired,” my wife pronounced,
“what you need is a new image.”
Short hair, simply brushed forward.
A parting of the ways.
Parting with a parting of the ways.
Parting with my parting.

Draft 2.

My hair says so much about him

Give me a colour-blind minister
who won’t let crimson streaks
tempt him to say
as he shakes my hand
at the chapel door
You look like a punk.

Who won’t have to smile
to show it’s a joke
and neither will I
as I walk away
grateful he’s highlighted
something I’ve long suspected.

Draft 1

Her hair says so much about him

Blessed be the colour-blind minister
who won’t be tempted
by crimson streaks
to say to a fortyish woman
after the Eucharist
You look like a punk.

He won’t have to smile
to show it’s a joke
and neither will she
as she walks away
grateful he’s highlighted
something she’s long suspected.

Homo Sapiens probably thought
it was pretty damn clever,
killing animals for their fur
but evolution is a funny thing.
It decided that warmer humans
didn’t need their own hairy coat
under this new regime.

In my teens, an uncle,
hairless before thirty,
blamed his use of Brylcreem.
I gave it up immediately,
massaged my scalp every day
to increase blood flow.

It may be an urban myth
but I read somewhere
that wearing tight hats
leads to baldness.
That also seems logical.

Lately, as the cold wind filters
through thinning thatch on autumn days,
I have decided to buy looser underwear.

A part of me is excised,
swept away by the brisk broom
of a Mauritian hairdresser.
She clips and cuts
as I sit in silence, recalling
long river journeys.

A history of water flows
through seventy years,
touches each strand,
extracts isotopic confessions
from thinning grey.

My dark accomplice
sweeps the polished beech,
gathers up my secrets.

Hair. Here’s ‘My father’s hair’ by Deryn Rees-Jones based on Christopher Smart’s poem ‘For My Cat Jeoffrey’:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/my-fathers-hair

and ‘Hairless’ by Jo Shapcott: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/hairless

Hair.