The poem: John Burnside
Being and Time
There are times when I think
of the knowledge we had as children:
the patterns we saw in number, or the spells
and recipes we had
for love and fear;
the knowledge we kept in the bones
for wet afternoons,
the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,
or how a lapwing’s egg can tip
the scale of the tongue;
how something was always present in the snow
that fell between our parish and the next,
a perfect thing, not what was always there,
but something we knew without knowing, as we knew
that everything was finite and alive,
cradled in warmth against the ache of space,
marsh-grass and shale, and the bloodroot we dug in the woods
that turned our fingers red, and left a stain
we kept for weeks, through snow and miles of sleep,
as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fate
unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.
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