Poem
Emily Berry
Winter
Winter
Winter
When the new room was built my mother showed me What To Do In Case Of Fire. There werefour metal rungs embedded in the balcony wall: this was the escape route. She did not show me
(then) the other one.
What happened was, my mother was very very sad. She was so sad she could not hold up her
head, she could not sit down, she could not lie down, she could not see out of the dark, my very
sad mum.
In the course of my research I learned a new kind of love. This lesson taught me to pray. I made a
prayer for my mother. By ‘prayer’ I mean a meditation on a want that can never be answered. A
prayer for the dead alive inside the living. That’s what it is to burn a flame. We were in the
darkest days of winter, approaching the celebration of light.
I watched the white men in their pastel coats / Roll you up and put you away / They put you
inside their white box / With its clicks and locks / And carried you far away
Emily Berry
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1981)
Emily Berry was born in 1981 and, other than time at university in Leeds, is ‘quite a diehard Londoner’, in her words, having lived there all her life. She has studied Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2008 received an Eric Gregory Award. In the same year, her pamphlet Stingray Fevers joined tall-lighthouse’s Pilot series, edited by Roddy Lumsden. In March 20...
Poems
Poems of Emily Berry
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Winter
When the new room was built my mother showed me What To Do In Case Of Fire. There werefour metal rungs embedded in the balcony wall: this was the escape route. She did not show me
(then) the other one.
What happened was, my mother was very very sad. She was so sad she could not hold up her
head, she could not sit down, she could not lie down, she could not see out of the dark, my very
sad mum.
In the course of my research I learned a new kind of love. This lesson taught me to pray. I made a
prayer for my mother. By ‘prayer’ I mean a meditation on a want that can never be answered. A
prayer for the dead alive inside the living. That’s what it is to burn a flame. We were in the
darkest days of winter, approaching the celebration of light.
I watched the white men in their pastel coats / Roll you up and put you away / They put you
inside their white box / With its clicks and locks / And carried you far away
Winter
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