This a tribute to one of my favourite American writers of recent times.
Zig-zagging through the Catholic ground
And I came across two graves in one;
The interred I knew not but the poet
Whose words illuminated her name
I recognised from an earlier life.
1985: a bookshop in Manchester,
One eager bibliophile,
Two new American writers,
Enter Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.
I listened to their readings,
I bought their signed books,
I drank the publishers' wine,
I chatted to Raymond Carver,
I liked his working class cleverness ...
... three years later he was dead,
Cancer took his brilliant brain.
But now I can visit his grave in a sense,
For his last words are someone else's beginning,
His 'Late Fragment' is also an early edict:
'And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth'.
Poetry by Christopher Fernie
Read 739 times
Written on 2016-05-16 at 00:02
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The Reunion
I was on my way to my mother's resting place,Zig-zagging through the Catholic ground
And I came across two graves in one;
The interred I knew not but the poet
Whose words illuminated her name
I recognised from an earlier life.
1985: a bookshop in Manchester,
One eager bibliophile,
Two new American writers,
Enter Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.
I listened to their readings,
I bought their signed books,
I drank the publishers' wine,
I chatted to Raymond Carver,
I liked his working class cleverness ...
... three years later he was dead,
Cancer took his brilliant brain.
But now I can visit his grave in a sense,
For his last words are someone else's beginning,
His 'Late Fragment' is also an early edict:
'And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth'.
Poetry by Christopher Fernie
Read 739 times
Written on 2016-05-16 at 00:02
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
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Lawrence Beck |
