Poem: Hilda Horsley’s Alarm Clock

Published on The Missing Slate, Tuesday 6 May

My first published poem appears on The Missing Slate as their Poem of the Week.Inspired by the World War I Centenary and a desire to see it not just from the point of view of the men fighting but the women affected at home, it is from the point of view of Hilda Horsley, a 17 year old dressmaker in Hartlepool in 1914. She was the first civilian and the first female casualty of the First World War, when the Germans shelled Hartlepool on 16th December 1914.

The bell sings       no more. A tooth

chipped, no cheshire cat

smile.    ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ It isn’t half

gawkey. The clock’s     face

scarred worse than         mine

when they found me, a       yawning

gape                                      ripped

straight through its afternoon

or dead                   of night.

At eight o’clock in the morning a piece

of shrapnel burrowed its tick into the small

intestine, like clockwork. The ground

shook still, and worried

the dinger into a frenzy of chattering

fit now only for hysterics.

I fumbled

the key in the shrunken lock with needle-

thin hands. Perhaps if the clock

had only broken

earlier I might have over-          slept

not been buried beneath

the clemmies of the front door

with that sound                ringing

out the blood from my    soaking

clothed                     bones.

Hilda Horsley's Alarm Clock on The Missing Slate >>