Wednesday 26 April 2017

2017.26 - Degrees

“There’s always seasonal work…” you say
Gazing through the window to the world beneath
“The year’s come round like a big circle thing.”
It’s hard to bite your lip and smile

Gazing through the window to the world beneath
I wonder what to say to you
It’s hard to bite your lip and smile
The window mostly gives me back myself

I wonder what to say to you
Waiting for the connection to resolve
The window mostly gives me back myself
I ask you what you’re doing now

Waiting for the connection to resolve
(The year’s come round like a big circle thing.)
I ask you what you’re doing now
“There’s always seasonal work…” you say.


Trying out a pantoum for the first time, yet again spending longer on untangling the explanations (and making a spreadsheet to do some of the heavy lifting for me) than on writing the poem. In case you’re wondering: the quotes in the first (and, therefore, final) stanza are genuine things a recruitment agent said to me while looking out of the fifth floor window after I was made redundant from a teaching post. It’s made a pleasing refrain and repeated (not always entirely sweet) in-joke in the intervening years, and seemed to suit the form.

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