Poetry

Question 1

Assisi

Answer 1

• “The dwarf with his hands on backwards / sat, slumped like a half-filled sack / on tiny twisted legs from which sawdust might run”
• “reveal to the illiterate the goodness / of god and the suffering / of His son”
• “Outside the three tiers of churches built / in honour of St Francis, brother of the poor, talker with birds”
• “whose eyes / wept pus, whose back was higher / than his head”
• “It was they who passed / the ruined temple outside”
• “I understood / the explanation and / the cleverness.”

Question 2

Basking Shark

Answer 2

• “That room-sized monster with a matchbox brain”
• “Emerging from the slime of everything”
• “So who’s the monster? The thought made me grow pale”
• “Swish up the dirt and, when it settles, a spring / is all the clearer”
• “To stub an oar on a rock where none should be”
• “Sail after sail, / the tall fin slid away and then the tail”

Question 3

Brooklyn Cop

Answer 3

• “Built like a gorilla but less timid”
• “He hoped it, he truly hoped it”
• “whose home is a place / he might, this time, never get back to?”
• “And who would be who have to be his victims”
• “what clubbings, what / gunshots”
• “thin tissue over violence”
• “should the tissue tear, should he plunge through / into violence”

Question 4

Hotel Room 12th Floor

Answer 4

• “the broken bones, the harsh screaming / from coldwater flats, the blood / glazed on sidewalks”
• “Its uncivilised darkness / is shot at by a million lit windows all / ups and acrosses”
• “This morning I watched from here”
• “I lie in bed, between / a radio and a television set, and hear / the wildest of warwhoops continualky ululating through / the glittering canyons and gulches”
• “But midnight is not / so easily defeated”
• “no stockades can keep the midnight out”

Question 5

Visiting Hour

Answer 5

• “The hospital smell / combs my nostrils”
• “I will not feel, I will not / feel”
• “so much pain, so / many deaths, their eyes / still clear after / so many farewells.”
• “She lies / in a white cave of forgetfulness.”
• “but the distance of pain that neither she nor I / can cross.”
• “She smiles a little at this / black figure in her white cave”

Question 6

Aunt Julia

Answer 6

• “She wore men’s boots / when she wore any.”
• ”- I can see her strong foot”
• “She was buckets / and water flouncing into them.”
• “silenced in the absolute black / of a sandy grave”
• “But I hear her still, welcoming me / with a seagull’s voice”
• “getting angry, getting angry”
• “with so many questions / unanswered.”