Hello friends.
Not a huge amount of poetry recommendation today, partly because I’m still stuck in the flytrap-sticky, rabbit hole world of Alan Turing and partly because the only other poetry I have read recently is by Adrienne Rich, and it’s not really my thing. In poetry as in prose fiction, I need a bit more of the surreal. I like a blurring of lines. There were lines I liked (“Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live/I want to see raised and brought dripping into the sun.” from IX of her Twenty One Love Poems) but in general it felt like captured moments played straight, rather than tampered with the way Tomas Tranströmer does it.
Maybe there isn’t such a thing as poems I like or dislike, only poems read at the right or wrong times. Who knows.
All I know is that you shouldn’t hold me to any of my lofty opinions when you read part 2 of It’s So Hot, So Very Very Hot.
The Roast Chicken and the Fried Egg Conundrum
The heat weighs more than us.
It forms the shape of the enemy,
unites us into a
sisterhood of wry-sighed smiles and
a brotherhood of bowed-head brow quirks.
“Tür freimachen!”
and we groan into smaller, stickier spaces
for the greater good.
Tourists, with their baggage like signs
around their necks
are more like us than
the summer is.
O tourists, commuters and shoppers of
the River Main’s Towered City!
Let me sing of entropy and which came first:
the aircon or the summer?
Do not despair,
for your sacrifice in this hell-tram
is lessening the suffering outside
(or at least not adding to it),
you unsung hero.
You need two interacting systems to
obey the second law of thermodynamics,
but you need a human mind to
really see the humour in it.