Carol Ann Duffy




Mrs Sisyphus

That's him pushing the stone up the hill, the jerk.
I call it a stone - it's nearer the size of a kirk.
When he first started out, it just used to irk,
but now it incenses me, and him, the absolute berk.
I could do something vicious to him with a dirk.
 
Think of the perks, he says.
What use is a perk, I shriek,
when you haven't the time to pop open a cork
or go for so much as a walk in the park?
He's a dork.
Folk flock from miles around just to gawk.
They think it's a quirk,
a bit of a lark.
A load of old bollocks is nearer the mark.
He might as well bark
at the moon -
that feckin' stone's no sooner up
than it's rolling back
all the way down.
 
And what does he say?
Mustn't shirk -
keen as a hawk,
lean as a shark
Mustn't shirk!
 
But I lie alone in the dark,
feeling like Noah's wife did
when he hammered away at the Ark;
like Frau Johann Sebastian Bach. 
My voice reduced to a squawk,
my smile to a twisted smirk;
while, up on the deepening murk of the hill,
he is giving one hundred per cent and more to his work.