‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
Another few lines from Carol Ann Duffy, this time from ‘Quickdraw’, again published in Rapture:
You’ve wounded me.
Next time, you speak after the tone. I twirl the phone,
then squeeze the trigger of my tongue, wide off the mark.
You choose your spot, then blast methrough the heart.
These lines express so well how we sometimes wound each other, indeed, how we snipe at each other, in what we say.
How does it happen that our lives can drift
far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time,
queuing for death? It seems nothing will shift
the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme
we make with loss to assonance with bliss.
Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds
from earth to heaven after rain. …
From Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Rapture’, published in Rapture, a collection of poems that are all part of one book-length love poem. I picked this up in town today, having previously read Duffy’s The Other Country. So far, so enjoyable …
My lover rises and plunges above me, not knowing
I have hidden myself in my heart, where I rock
and weep for what has been stolen, lost. Please.
It is like an earthquake and no one to tell.
From Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Survivor’, published in The Other Country.
Karl Möller 