The Painting Poem by David Lewis Paget

The painting sat in an old junk shop
At the far end of The Strand,
It caught my eye and it made me stop
Though the subject wasn't grand.
A woman stood in a window frame
And she stared out at the street,
The pavement there was of cobblestones
And the whole thing was, well, neat!

The basic thing that had caught my eye
Was the woman's face, I know,
I didn't think she had sat for it
But it looked like Billie Jo.
The likeness there was remarkable
In the lips, that sullen pout,
The hooded eyes that had looked so wise,
Overall, it knocked me out.

I bought the painting and took it home
And I showed my Billie Jo,
She couldn't believe the likeness, and
I said, ‘I told you so.'
‘You're sure that you didn't sit for this,
I find it rather strange? '
The look on her face said something else,
Like guilt, but rearranged.

‘I don't want to talk about the thing,
You shouldn't have brought it home,
The look of that woman's creepy,
I'd have left it well alone.'
‘It's almost as if you have a twin, '
I said to Billie Jo,
‘There may be some things about you, girl,
You don't want me to know.'

She shrugged, and she walked away just then
So I hung it on the wall,
She made me pull it down and hang it
Somewhere in the hall,
She didn't care just where, she said
But she didn't want to see,
The face of that strange woman, she said,
‘Looking back at me.'

The footsteps came on that very night
And they padded in the hall,
We woke and we lay awake in dread
And Billie began to bawl.
‘She's come, I know that she's come for me,
When I thought I'd put her down,
The day that she rode that coal black hearse,
And was buried in the ground.'

I said that she'd best come clean with me
And she told about her twin,
‘I didn't tell you before, because she
Frightened me out of my skin.
She used to say that she hated me
And would somehow bring me harm,
I caught her poisoning fizzy drinks
When we lived down on the farm.'

‘We had a fight in the cattle yard
That was one of her designs,
She kicked at me and she fell back hard,
Impaled on the baler tines.
She coughed up blood and she looked at me
And she spat, with her final breath,
‘You'll not escape, I'll open the gates
Of hell, to do you death.''

‘She must have posed for that picture
In the week before she died,
And you have brought her on home to me,
I could swear that the picture sighed.'
I took it away the following day
And I burnt it in the well,
As the fire devoured the woman's face,
It shrieked, from the gates of hell.

27 May 2017