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