where they were born

It's National Poetry Day on Thursday :-)

... this year's theme is 'refuge' - and I'll try and blip a few poems, on the theme, in the run up to the big day.

So; here's a Kayo Chingonyi poem, as taken from his 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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