this leave-taking hour

We just could not resist visiting the rather wonderful Portobello Bookshop the other day - it led to some inevitable, poetry purchases ...

... so; here's a verse from a poet, Kayo Chingonyi, who is new to my ever-expanding collection; as taken from the pictured 2017 volume:


'Round Midnight'

Hour of bones singing a blues of cold
setting in, camp beds, vouchsafed mattresses
in overcrowded rooms. The lost growing old

in post-industrial towns, words in their heads
from the tongues of long-defunct countries
and only these words in case they forget

where they were born, street names, all those sundries
that, in retrospect, amount to a life.
Who stops to take note of the smell of trees

this leave-taking hour, turning like Edith
to commit a burning place to memory,
knowing, even in this harshest of lights,

what's understood is a reverie
faded in a year, gone in a century?

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Kayo Chingonyi (1987 - )

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