Poetry 17 June 2020 Anthropocene Everyman A new poem from Graham Mort. Getty Sign UpGet the New Statesman\'s Morning Call email. Sign-up January’s advent of rain drops from chiffon clouds unfurling over roof-smoke, flung starlings steadying themselves in sharpened air, rain on paving stones spotting the windows of houses that wake in yellow light, radio-news spilling in to dissipate the dark. You turn your face skyward, rain’s dizzy specks falling upwards/outwards; you feel almost nothing you should rejoice, alive after all, carrying out bin bags, the rain reminding you that we have sinned, its sour nothings whispered onto slate, that lip of sky curling to suicidal blue. You turn away, stifling warm wishes you might offer yourself, greeting a dead car in the driveway, face broken in the mirrors of your footprints. You’d be hungry if you could raise that brute desire, if you were young again, maybe, except not that, not that. There’s her face at the window, your child looking down. You raise a hand where a bird might have flown free to rain’s aura of extinction, stumbling unshriven, unshaven, old-time prophet in a blue kagool. Graham Mort teaches at Lancaster University and lives in North Yorkshire. A poet and short-story writer, he won the Edge Hill Prize in 2011 for "Touch" (Seren). His latest book, "Like Fado", will be published by Salt in August. › How the US helped leading Nazis escape Europe This article appears in the 19 June 2020 issue of the New Statesman, The History Wars