Sasha Dugdale (b. 1974) has published four collections of poetry, most recently Joy (Carcanet, 2017) which was a PBS Choice. The title poem ‘Joy’ won the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is a translator of Russian poetry and plays, and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She is writer-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge.
Events
Yesterday
The last day of your childhood
We go up to the green hills where you are at home
Look down on the buzzards
And the sludge-coloured winter valley
The loosening of frost has released it back into decomposition
And no colour is intact
It undoes itself in algae
And wealden agony which is a paler version of the Slavic
Like aging in comfort
I’m walking the dogs
But in a cellar in my mind I am rehearsing a scene
In which a woman takes her child to a wasteland
And abandons it
War is coming and she is in flight
I’m wondering about the difference in sensibility
Between this woman and me
I’m wondering about the imaginative difference
What I would be if the air was never still
And the horizon smoking
But the air is still
Apart from my prattling
How I like to seize the moment
Hold words to its throat like
Future and luck and hope
Words that are countless and
Without value
Expended like shells into an area
In which all life
Is extinguished
The only chance of life here
The only small hope is in the repeated
Movement of lung and heart
Your willingness to forgive
The loosening between us
Sussex, 22 January 2017