I only have one more poem to share from this session. After this I’ll no doubt start moving some other old stuff over here though.
No recommendations today, as I just finished Grey and although I appreciated the closure on the series, you can just imagine a terrible stalking experience except the stalker is a billionaire and there you have it: you have experienced Grey. Congratulations.
I have, however, begun reading Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer. It’s dense and intense and a very focused read. The difficulty of the language – or rather the obscurity of the sentences – draws you in with that focus, to a world which I believe is (thankfully) unthinkable to most white, Western people of my age, and it makes you think about it. Crazy uncomfortable, but you can’t – mustn’t – look away. More as I progress.
And now for a poem.
Redworth Road
The sixth human sense is the feel of time passing.
The hours fill this room
and go liquid like syrup,
and sweetish as rot at the foot of the pile so you
sweep the spare minutes beneath the tall armchair
and stuff them in cushions to hide them away.
Feed your spare hours to the low, brooding fire.
Time fills the mouths of the still china dogs
and it pours from the drawers with their
tinfoil and string.
All the warm hours press on the glass of the greenhouse.
Just open the door and they flood the back garden; they rise,
slow and weightless,
above the clean washing to hang in the air
and one day to rain down
on a tundra,
a mountain,
a desert,
an ocean,
where someday their meaning will
leach into nothing or everything.
They will forget they were yours.