a ration of heartbeats

Here's the second of the new poetry books I picked up when we were over in Glasgow at the weekend ...

... it's the 2013 Michael Symmons Roberts collection, Drysalter, which contains 150 poems, all of 15 lines in length. Here's one of them:


THE COUNT
 
Born with a ration of heartbeats
we should eke them out, walk the shores
of great, still lakes and tap their wells.
Trees should be our mentors, tall ones
where the crown lolls like a cowl.
 
We could learn from astronomers,
breathless on the high plains where the air
is clear: tilting huge scopes
at scattergrams of long-dead suns,
tracing patterns among the crystalline.
 
Or a pearl river diver with swallowed breath
and heart rate halved, combing beds of weed
in search of abalone, urchin, unaware
that when she surfaces she is the last soul left,
the rest of us spent up and gone.

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Michael Symmons Roberts (1963 - )

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