A new (to me) transatlantic voice! Major Jackson, is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, teaches at the University of Vermont, and is poetry editor of The Harvard Review. This poem from his new collection, Roll Deep (W W Norton and Co, £11.99), describes his return to consciousness in the early morning amid the “sweet clamors” of the neighbourhood birds.
CRIES & WHISPERS
Every day I forget something, yet happy
I never forget to wake
to the bright corollas of summer
mornings. In the jury box of my bed,
I listen to the counterarguments
of finches and blue jays, cardinals and
the tufted titmice, and the sharp judgment
of the crow, grow to sweet clamors.
In my neighbourhood, someone like me
is sitting at a kitchen table taking down notes
between bites of granola and gentle sips
of oolong tea and recording the soap opera
in the trees. The pen is her large
antenna to the mysteries which come
in alternate currents of slapstick
and calamity. She writes away her nights
of emptiness and boredom. We’d be perfect
in a Bergman film, both of us entering into day
seeking the final appearance of things,
bumping around like this. A delivery truck
backs into a driveway. The streets
begin their excited breathing.
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