Women Who Dye Their Hair by Fisher, Janet

Her poems illuminate small moments between people, passing threads of conversation, and make of them something resonant and universal. - Maura Dooley

"A sense of shared knowledge with other women, a quiet expression of sisterhood without all the politicising and drum-beating, is what sets Janet's Fisher's work apart from that of other poets writing about similar situations." Jane Holland

Women who Dye their Hair

Some of us have done it since our twenties
when our hair turned white on the death of a loved one
or it ran in the family like baldness, and some of us
spray red or purple on shaved stubble,
and others have let it creep up on us,
counting the odd hair, then the fifth, the fiftieth,
till our teenagers point out how old we're getting
but our lovers who hate anything artificial
like make-up and sequins, though they accept
icecream and the Pill, say we shouldn't bother

And when the roots start to show we carelessly
pop into the hairdresser and book a colour
which means a cut and blow and takes all morning
so we can catch up on our reading, extending
our knowledge of the stars and multiple orgasm,
but we have to go every six weeks or it starts to fade
and by now the local firm is turning our hair to hay
so we find a better one at fifty quid a splash,
a rollercoaster we can't get off of,
and we decide to let it all grow out and be our age
which isn't a hundred and five but might as well be.

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