Poem
Karen Press
Soft
Soft
Soft
Soft on a summer bed in the Languedoca man in an Afghan prison sits with me
watching his brother walking through snowdrifts
to a village much like this one
(boucherie, tabac, boulangerie, broken shutters)
where a month’s supply of bullets lies secured
in a box beneath his mother’s wedding carpet.
Turning the pages of Bruce Chatwin’s life
I feel the ashy bodies shift and stutter downward
through steel sticks broken on New York’s southern streets.
Peruvian feathers hang in coloured blocks
across the whiteness of a wall in England,
the man in the snow takes another step forward,
under a sky-blue burqa a woman writes to the man in prison
without pen or paper.
Together we turn the pages, always together now.
Lavender. Ash. Snow on a black beard.
Marseillette – Kabul – New York, September 2001
© 2002, Karen Press
From: The Canary’s Songbook
Publisher: Carcanet (UK),
From: The Canary’s Songbook
Publisher: Carcanet (UK),
Poems
Poems of Karen Press
Close
Soft
Soft on a summer bed in the Languedoca man in an Afghan prison sits with me
watching his brother walking through snowdrifts
to a village much like this one
(boucherie, tabac, boulangerie, broken shutters)
where a month’s supply of bullets lies secured
in a box beneath his mother’s wedding carpet.
Turning the pages of Bruce Chatwin’s life
I feel the ashy bodies shift and stutter downward
through steel sticks broken on New York’s southern streets.
Peruvian feathers hang in coloured blocks
across the whiteness of a wall in England,
the man in the snow takes another step forward,
under a sky-blue burqa a woman writes to the man in prison
without pen or paper.
Together we turn the pages, always together now.
Lavender. Ash. Snow on a black beard.
Marseillette – Kabul – New York, September 2001
From: The Canary’s Songbook
Soft
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