‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’
‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’
‘We all want to be / monuments but can’t help shoving our fingers / in dirt.’
‘If you need proof you’re alive, regard the oar / in your hand.’
‘sometimes I need / the sound of something pulled up from the roots / and tossed aside’
‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’
‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’
‘You know about my / emotional drinking, and my night walks and my / fragmented heart-to-heart conversations.’
‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’
‘I’m in no hurry; I’ll not storm your dreams’
‘held at the curve of the eye / for a dream of shared life’
‘It makes no difference / If the devil has been defeated or if it is your character’
Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
‘One starless night, I was stranded. Needless to say, foreigners are often stranded.’
