it's so late

Have a busy couple of weeks ahead - might be quite a bit of poetry-blipping ;-)

So; here is a favourite Michael Symmons Roberts poem, as taken from within the pictured 2013 collection, Drysalter - it contains 150 poems, all of them are 15-lines in length:


In Praise of the Present

If being here and now is nothing more
than memory on the fly, then love
is just a trace of having loved, over

and over-recorded, so each new
detail - that lock of hair that mimes
your cheekbone's curve, those blue

ghost-maps beneath cream skin -
becomes a vivid present, and a fix,
a holding fast, a living in

not after. This I pledge: to stay
awake, for death can keep its dreams.
Here is enough, and now, time's alchemy.

So put your book down, it's so late.
I lean in close and say your name,
to print it on the face of night.

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Michael Symmons Roberts (1963 - )

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