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SHARON OWENS

ART

AUTHOR & ARTIST

Hello and welcome.

I’m an author and artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I am inspired by those unheralded men and women leading quietly heroic lives behind the privet hedges and half-drawn blinds of suburbia.

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Click here to read THE PHOTOGRAPH, first published in ULSTER TATLER

Click here to read ELLEN MURRAY AND HER CRAZY HATS, first published in SOCIAL AND PERSONAL

Click here to read THE HAMMERED HEART, first published in the SUNDAY EXPRESS

Click here to read THE SUMMERHOUSE, first published in the SUNDAY EXPRESS

Click here to read TWO LETTERS, first published in OMAGH TODAY

Click here to read VALENTINE BLUES, first published in WOMAN’S WAY

With warmest wishes,

Sharon

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A SECRET GARDEN - by Sharon Owens

 

Everything they had, they worked hard for it

No trust funds, no easy money there

A farm-hand by the age of ten

Forking hay in his bare feet

She was a maid of all works

In Belfast

 

When the woollen mills closed down

He worked in a factory in Coventry

Then tested motorcycles in Rugby

During the war he dug for victory

She ran a boarding house

His wife now

 

They came home in 1945

Bought a cottage and three fields

Put a red tin roof on the cottage

Flowers at the windows

A yellow kitchen

With a gas cooker

 

They turned one field into a garden

Vegetables laid out in rows

Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beans

Onions, chives, beetroot, parsley

Pebble paths and painted stones

Victorian style

 

Strangest thing about that garden

You couldn’t see it from the house

Across the yard and up a slope

Behind a hedge and a holly tree

A secret garden

Just for them

 

A red wooden gate, a strip of lawn

Lupins in one corner, rhubarb in another

A bird’s nest with pale blue eggs

Don’t touch it, only look

Butterflies in the summer

And once, a rabbit trespassing

 

Strawberries in the summer

Bright red dots against green leaves

So sweet, your eyes blinking

Hardly any left for jam

Gooseberries, blackcurrants

Redcurrants, raspberries

 

Peony roses in the centre beds

Richly pink, I picked a bunch

Pretending I was getting married

Stepping up and down the paths

Traffic distant beyond the hedge

Time standing still

 

A secret garden just for me

Sitting on an old bus seat

Swinging my legs

Eating peas straight from the pod

Rose and James, my grandparents

How I loved them

 

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ROSE, 1916 (oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches)