Poem for August

 

AWAY AND SEE

 

Away and see an ocean suck at a boiled sun

and say to someone things I’d blush even to dream.

Slip off your dress in a high room over the harbour.

Write to me soon.

 

New fruits sing on the flipside of night in a market

of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby

stopping you dead, the peach in your hand respiring.

Taste it for me.

 

Away and see the things that words give a name to, the flight

of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words

wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.

Spell them with love.

 

Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end, hopeful.

Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,

horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the future.

Ask him his name.

 

Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see

for yourself. Walk. Fly. Take a boat till land reappears,

altered for ever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on. Gon.

Away and see.  

 

Carol Ann Duffy

 

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