I think I can safely assure you that the Editor and I will not be on speaking terms for quite a few days yet. Even so, here I sit, bellowing ‘post! post! It’s nearly midnight!’ at myself in very nearly her tones. Possibly she hypnotised me during our last Hard Stare Stand-Off.
But as it is, I’ve had a long day and am fresh out of creativity. So we’ll go Dumpster Diving again, shall we? Oh yes, here’s something. How about a blank verse extravaganza?
Humanities – the British Library
High above the walls and tiers of scholars
Where ceiling meets the windows, there is blue
In streaks along the blanker surface, sun
In golden squares that stretch through afternoons
So dizzyingly out of reach. The sky
Beyond the soaring architectured space,
The reachless sky unreachable, is echoed,
As in deep water, under the white sweep,
Much as the cliffs of Dover, of the walls,
By scattered flakes of light, the reading lamps.
In one part of the Room the ceiling’s low
And glowing under a whole new Room of desks;
The pillars and the skylights are their walls,
They hang beneath the tent-like curve of ours.
The doubled hum of half a hundred people
All up at once and trailing through the reefs
Of desks, the ranks of blond and studious wood,
Becomes the hush, a peace inhabited.
The moist and bookish air in which we work
Is climate fit for paper and not us,
As sea is fit for fishes and we swim
At our own risk, exhalted by the cold
Of diving in the archive of this Earth,
A swaying mine of salt, the sunlight shafts
The only struts, and our deep thoughts as close
To heaven as horizons are, mountains
No higher nor no lower than the sea.
