Poem of the week

Poem of the week: The Three Rs by Kelly Grovier - The Guardian

A consideration of changing worlds, personal and planetary, with appropriately shifting registers

The Three Rs

The world always begins
with a phrase – instinctive,

unthinking – an utterance
from which meaning

follows only gradually, if ever,
conjugating itself in water, heat,

and the reactions trigger
further reactions: the angle

of one’s heart, long divisions
of suffering. Somewhere,

a girl is holding a sign: the name
of a passenger whose train

will never arrive. Meanwhile
I am here, talking to you,

banging on about the effing
ineffable, never knowing

whether a stranger
in another world, waiting

on a platform, is ever going
to spell my name right.

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