Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Elizabeth Howkins

print this page

Czardas

Suddenly you were gone,
cut loose by a surgeon's careless blade
and your language went with you,
snipped out of my life with sharp scissors,
leaving a star-shaped hole.

Suddenly there was silence where earlier
vowels had sizzled sensuously
and consonants had danced in familiar patterns,
sharp and clear as little suns set firmly
on their prongs.

When I hear your language spoken now,
so seldom and by so few, I follow its music
like a hungry soldier behind a beaten drum,
follow its string of sound back to you
into the dark forest where your light went out
without a trace, into the house empty now
and covered with thin gouache of moon,
into rooms hard and silent as painted enamels
glowing with colors, a house silent and empty
of language, filled to the brim with ghosts,
tiny ghosts whose lips are sewed into silence
tight as a trouser seam.

Your language, bearing the past now, and bending
beneath its weight, has become a silver dagger
that turns like a screw in the heart
and each time I hear it, I cannot bear the silence
behind the sound, the weightless footsteps
of your fragile ghost, dancing like moonlight
down the empty stairs.

 

Page(s) 23

Back to top