Poem of the week: Pool by Rowan Williams | Poetry
Pool
A twig breaks. Quickly, kindly
staging the haiku, one or two new frogs
plop in the water, where their youngest
parents lie or skitter, hundreds
and hundreds of big swept commas
from the composer’s workbench
in the sandy shallows, hundreds
small oily breathing pauses in the water
boring paragraph. When their breath
swollen eyes and shining limbs,
they will also wait, throbbing at the edge of the pond
Edge, listening to danger,
for the dry foot of this uncertain
upper world that no one predicted
when it was all wet for a long time without noise
clauses between the wriggling of black breath;
ready to jump from this new purgatory
back height in constant darkness, far away
(for a while at least) terrors
of what the sun sucks up –
green, limbs, lungs, even words
or wings.