Culture
26 April 2012

"It Has Rained All Week": a poem by Antony Dunn

 

and you’ve set down the things you have to say
of love and home and of your baby boy
and shut your book and put your pen away
and, outside, nothing is but green and grey,
so wet with rain that it must never dry.
 
It’s later than you thought, and what remains
but this? to walk out past the raspberry canes
barefoot, to drop your sweater on the lawn,
to cast off everything along the lane,
wade into open country and the rain.
 
And at the tree-line turn but once to look
at where you’ve come from, if you will, then back
into the nearer birch and farther oak
and know your skin is stiffening with bark
or bristling with fur. The wood is dark
 
and all you know of love and all of pain
is falling from you. All you know is rain.

This article first appeared in the 30 April 2012 issue of the New Statesman, The puppet master

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