Alphabet
A is for rows of children, neatly folded
like deckchairs on polished wood, the endlessness
of concrete playtimes: then the creak of blackboards
and the squish of spaghetti.
before night, their laughter is couched
in a shyness, and even the buses, painted
brighter than fire, lollop romantically, and lurch
them home, though home is still boundless.
Canaletto might have taken a different view
through a clay-scented streak of Yorkshire window,
through the comforting grey of a girl's sock,
or the calumph-clinch-jicker of teapot on crisp muslin.
do you think nostalgia comes with age, or distance
from our starting-point, or are we born
with that tendency to tear, or be torn, or to long
like there was no today,
let alone tomorrow: to dance backwards,
to write as if in mirrors?
(even the birds rhyme, as they clutter on wires
and we wonder if they mean to, or if they derive
pleasure from their closeness as we do:
two bird-widths,
three bird-widths
and then the whole of Africa,
flung into unknowing like a night-terror.)
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girls weave cigarettes into pine-trees of wisp:
half-loves pile up into card and ash.
I love to forget those years, one summer at a time,
jungled in the sweetness of being lost.
knowledge tricked us then; languages sang us
into the mossy dew of otherness, and nightbirds
reminded us each evening of how much there was
left still to know, and still to forget.
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o is for the world: and poetry, which is the friction
of love against the world. lines wriggle
in quiet disobedience: rainy churches sit
full of sin, and then the needle skips and lurches
and undermines, and undoes.
v is for vain, in which we must love, or not at all:
x a conquest or obliteration
(your breath is hotter than deserts tonight,
where we tremble) and zed is the angle of dancers,
the awkward hip-jut of the shyest girl,
the whirr of the heron when she flies.
Poetry by Woodworm
Read 320 times
Written on 2005-09-11 at 11:01
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