Poem 525

A ground note of pain resonating under everything …

… many years later I read Howard Barker’s play Gertrude: The Cry that rotates round a similar idea …

The Cry

Her sharp cry can never be dimmed
or blunted
                    pierces the earth
is heard in old gearboxes
                                                    and pulsing
back from stars

her sharp cry
is partly the razor screech of a possum
the sobbing of a sheet of tin
         in the wind
partly the mythical murdered cries of plants
twined together
to climb into hearing
                                           the elements of aloneness
in a cough
is cats dogs horses and violins
at the point of death

her sharp cry digs like nails into my head
it drops out of a bottomless blue sky
           filling my ears with ground glass
           with the sound of fingernails
           creasing back
her sharp cry has no accent
                                                          rings the world
and keeps on ringing …
                                                    the deaf can hear nothing else