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1968 Poem
Tuesday, 2 August 2022 at 10:14
IMMIGRANT
Came off mountains with memories of woodsmoke and sharp thunder into city smog which hurt my lungs. You laughed, dubbing me bizarre and kept me as a wonder.
Arrived one early morning to present a honeycomb with bees still buzzing in my words; imagined you would not resent stinging with the sweetness. You asserted I was mad and called the janitor to throw me out.
Should realise the city hands out nothing I could want. But you hold the promise of fresh rain, cool umber of the mountains in your eyes. Expect me at eight in evening dress bearing a box of chocolates.
1968
Ronnie Sullivan told me it had the quality of a telegram, I suppose because of the pronoun drop characteristic of early Auden. Yes, of course, I accept that my vision of the immigrant being truer to the natural world is sentimental.
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A poem for every year I've written 1
Monday, 1 August 2022 at 14:35
HARMATTAN
I am a dry wind, conceived in the womb of the Red Sea, blowing from burning libraries at Alexandria, searching for knowledge lost at my birth. Men call me arid, but I purify my desert drying any pools of polluted feeling. And in that pebbled, heated land where no men live their forgotten temples lie buried in my sands of thought.
I cannot move forever. My impetus dies in the humid lands, a southern end of my existence. Instead of purifying I become defiled. From a Mediterranean birth to an Atlantic death, a dying breeze off the Accra shore and I weep.
1967
My first poem anyone thought fit to print. Ronnie Sullivan, the editor of Poetry and Audience told me he thought of it as a metaphor for history. In terms of meteorology it’s a bit of a stretch to have the wind beginning in the Red Sea and blowing across the Sahara to West Africa, but poetic licence was given to me by this poem.
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