waiting for a train (no, really)

About to head off to Brussels after spending a wonderful weekend in Oxford with dr_biscuit and husband. Maybe one day I will return when it is not almost too cold to be outside.

We saw The King's Speech; I adored it, and of course the reference to shell-shock collided in my head with all the stuff about stammers in the Regeneration trilogy and, well, this happened. 20% King George, 20% Billy Prior, 60% excuse to alliterate a lot.

~

speech therapy

Between my teeth and the tip of my tongue
is Timbuktu: a city's span of sibilance,
stuttered streets and missing sounds.
No hiss of gas. My palate holds impossible
peaks of pristine mountains, iced and marbled, pale.

What can't you say, my boy,
my brave bold boy with bombed-out
eyes and ceasefire sighs
-- repeat it ten times fast. Go on.
What is it you can't say?

This is not my language, this lump of lead
laid in the larynx. From the clutch of my throat
to the edge of my lips is the earth to the sun,
a sprained and spitless space;
my voice the vacuum. My language lost.

Could hear a pin drop into the mud
of far-off fields, the flutter of fingers awake
and afraid on folded sheets. What won't you say?
My own tongue, sympathetic, dries to stone.
I could be deaf but for the clock.

My silence is the sound before shells,
when worn and wet we wait the same eternity
that exists when I open my mouth.
In the pause before each consonant
six soldier's lifetimes tick by.