Cento

 

Cento

I remember the nights, and the sound of the nights.
It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been
tasting the salt on the wind and, in the first
commitment driving fast and unswerving,
we learned to count, to rule off days.

But that’s it, not here they are but
keep moving. Go as fast as you can
in the great half-crazy tune of the song of reasons.
In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
tilt us headlong.

 

Lines
1. What it’s like to be alive, Deryn Rees Jones,
2. The Missing Poem, Mark Halliday
3. Boggle Hole, Cliff Yates
4. The Way we Live, Kathleen Jamie
5. Timetable, Kate Clanchy

6. Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910, Don Coles
7. The blessing, Helen Dunmore
8. Song of Reasons, Robert Pinsky
9. The Horses, Ted Hughes
10. Hourglasses in the Church at Jukkas Jarvi, Penelope Shuttle