Mrs Sisyphus

Carol Ann Duffy

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.