Carol Ann Duffy - From Mrs Tiresias lyrics

All I know is this: he went out for his walk a man and came home female. Out the back gate with his stick, the dog; wearing his gardening kecks, an open-necked shirt, and a jacket in Harris tweed I'd patched at the elbows myself. Whistling. He liked to hear the first cuckoo of spring then write to The Times. I'd usually heard it days before him but I never let on. I'd heard one that morning while he was asleep; just as I heard, at about 6 p.m., a faint sneer of thunder up in the woods and felt a sudden heat at the back of my knees. He was late getting back. I was brushing my hair at the mirror and running a bath when a face swam into view next to my own. The eyes were the same. But in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts. When he uttered my name in his woman's voice I pa**ed out * Life has to go on. I put it about that he was a twin and this was his sister come down to live while he himself was working abroad. And at first I tried to be kind; blow-drying his hair till he learnt to do it himself, lending him clothes till he started to shop for his own, sisterly, holding his soft new shape in my arms all night. Then he started his period. One week in bed. Two doctors in. Three paink**ers four times a day. And later a letter to the powers that be demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year. I see him still, his selfish pale face peering at the moon through the bathroom window. The curse, he said, the curse. Don't kiss me in public, he snapped the next day, I don't want folk getting the wrong idea. It got worse. After the split I would glimpse him out and about, entering glitzy restaurants on the arms of powerful men - though I knew for sure there'd be nothing of that going on if he had his way - or on TV telling the women out there how, as a woman himself, he knew how we felt. His flirt's smile. The one thing he never got right was the voice. A cling peach slithering out from its tin. I gritted my teeth. And this is my lover, I said, the one time we met at a glittering ball under the lights, among tinkling gla**, and watched the way he stared at her violet eyes, at the blaze of her skin, at the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck; and saw him picture her bite, her bite at the fruit of my lips, and hear my red wet cry in the night as she shook his hand saying How do you do: and I noticed then his hands, her hands, the clash of their sparkling rings and their painted nails.