Poem
Sarah Howe
Envoi
Envoi
Envoi
Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lostits wintered savour – my sceptic’s mewling cries
fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no-man’s-land.
If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom?
Estrangement – it had seemed so accidental –
was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity.
It wasn’t that randoms fingered you in bars.
I’m minded of your restive legs, once so sleek
in turquoise denim, now a fuss of cosseted skirts.
The worst is you can’t share my unclean food.
Go, my brave hyperbole, chase your cabbalistic
constellations: whether questing beast or curate’s
egg, clear-eyed or fly-addled, I can’t settle on.
Go. Or come. You’re the current, I’m the flotsam.
© 2015, Sarah Howe
Sarah Howe
(Hong_kong, 1983)
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her poetry is precisely painted and aesthetically striking, often grappling with, and delighting in, problems of cultural identity and representation. Like Kei Miller’s explorations of hybridity and cross-cultural identities, Howe’s poetry is inventive, ...
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Poems of Sarah Howe
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Envoi
Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lostits wintered savour – my sceptic’s mewling cries
fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no-man’s-land.
If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom?
Estrangement – it had seemed so accidental –
was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity.
It wasn’t that randoms fingered you in bars.
I’m minded of your restive legs, once so sleek
in turquoise denim, now a fuss of cosseted skirts.
The worst is you can’t share my unclean food.
Go, my brave hyperbole, chase your cabbalistic
constellations: whether questing beast or curate’s
egg, clear-eyed or fly-addled, I can’t settle on.
Go. Or come. You’re the current, I’m the flotsam.
Envoi
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