Geoffrey Hill(1932-2016) in the The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon 2009
The dead man reads his poem on the screen,
alive on the year my mother died;
now dead, waiting for a burial,
the dead man reads his poem
in the past, in the now.
It's tortured speech, the lines,
the sentences becoming separated,
the connection between them lost;
each set free, each abandoned,
each pushed out there in the world,
in that moment, in this moment.
Each flickering, dying down.
Words escaping lips
to what could be eternity,
words escaping a living corpse
to life, immortality, postponement of
annihilation surely. Desperate words
thrown out at the world,
like grappling hooks
to save what can be saved,
pulling out parts of the living, dead man
to that moment around him,
to this recording, to my screen,
to my ears and mind
escaping from death, the words,
the final moment to come that came...
Escaping, shards of a man
waiting for his funeral.
04.07.2016
