A Reading

Went to the Peter Sirr and Tom French reading at Hodges Figgis. Musical intro and interludes from a beautiful drummer girl (lower right). I bought both books and haven't read them though though I've been dipping. I know many of Peter's already, including the opening poem, The Mapmaker's Song, which is classic Sirr:

I want to be,
beyond everything I’ve reached or drawn,
not much at all, or all there is,
a geographer of breath,
a curator of hands.

I also enjoyed French's poems, particularly the short sequence about his mother, 02.07.2012. So she apparently died in the same year my own mother did (and I too have written a short sequence about her), and those last lines could be about my mother:

On a morphine pump nestled
between pillows, bearing beads
of moisture on its breath ––
this is how kindness leaves the earth.