Watching Mum Get Her Hair Done

The hairdresser circumnavigated my mum’s head,
conducting a symphony of blonde curls,

a pointed, shiny, metal comb in one expert hand,
a can of hairspray in the other that turned hair into cement.

But I didn’t really watch my mum get her hair done.
There was too much else to take in.

My eyes were drawn to shiny bottles and sprays,
in silver, pink and blue, lined up in platoons on shelves.

I was entranced by the hedgehog-spiky curlers,
bobby pins, scissors, curling tongs and pictures of 1960s models

with their perfect hair. Breathless from dye and chemical perming lotion,
I toed drifts of chopped hair around a styling chair.

The dryers lining one wall were like rockets
containing the heads of ladies swathed in gowns and towels,

magazines open, chatting and nodding to other spacewomen.
I smiled as I imagined them zooming noisily into space.

Kim M. Russell, 6th January 2026

Image found on Pinterest

It’s Tuesday, and at the dVerse Poets Pub it’s the first Poetics of 2026 – and we are borrowing Bishop with Dora, who tells us that she has been reading some of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and noticed ‘something familiar and odd at the same time’.

Dora goes on to explore what Bishop thinks a poem should contain: “Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery”, and picks out three of her poems that illustrate them. I rather like ‘The Filling Station’ and agree that ‘the “mystery” is in the ordinary details’.

For the first poetics challenge of the year, Dora would like us to dip our word-brushes into Bishop’s poetic inkpot, consciously incorporating accuracy (detail), spontaneity (immediacy), and mystery (revelation) to write our own original poems, using the three poems by Bishop as examples to take our reader to a place, a person, an occasion.

29 thoughts on “Watching Mum Get Her Hair Done”

  1. Kim, That opening couplet is to die for, as they used to say, and sets the tone for all the accruing details that take us right up to the blast off! The humor mingling with the gleefulness of the memory also shows up in other lines as well which makes the reading all the more pleasurable. I love too descriptions like,

    shiny bottles and sprays,
    in silver, pink and blue, lined up in platoons on shelves

    and

    I toed drifts of chopped hair around a styling chair.

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  4. This is exquisitely drawn, Kim! 😍 I so love the descriptions “the hedgehog-spiky curlers,bobby pins, scissors, curling tongs and pictures of 1960s models with their perfect hair,” and oh “the dryers lining one wall were like rockets,” .. you took me to that era and I could visualize everything. ❤️❤️

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  8. Kim, I was just at the hairdresser on Saturday. Reading this I see so much remains the same in those institutions of beauty. When I sit under the dryer it gives me a chance to catch up on everything in People Magazine. Very awesome poem that resonates with me.

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  12. Happy New Year’s Kim – all the strange and amusing particulars of the pre-digital beauty salon are here, sampled in wonder by this initiate into womanhood. A linoleum sanctum charged with rocket caps.

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  13. I love all the specificity as observed by the child, Kim, but I relly love the ending when imagination overtakes observation and she sees the women under the hairdryers as astronauts – wonderful…

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  14. Kim, you brought the salons of the 60s to life … I appreciated your wide-eyed girl’s creative/dreamlike perspective. Spacewomen!!!!! I didn’t step foot into a beauty salon until I was a grown woman with toddlers. My grandfather cut my hair as a child, My mother cut her own as did I when I felt brave enough. Still do.

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