Kathryn Simmonds (born 1972) is a British poet, and short story writer.
ELEGY FOR THE LIVING
Kathryn Simmonds
We wash up side by side
to find each other
in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,
inhabit our landscape;
the curve
of that chair draped
with your shirt;
my glass of water
seeded overnight with air.
After this bed
there’ll be another,
so we’ll roll
and keep rolling
until one of us
will roll alone and try to roll
the other back — a trick
no one’s yet pulled off —
and it’ll be
as if I dreamed you, dear,
as if I dreamed this bed,
our touching limbs,
this room, the tree outside alive
with new wet light.
Not now. Not yet.
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THE WORLD WON’T MISS YOU FOR A WHILE
Kathryn Simmonds
Lie down with me you hillwalkers and rest,
untie your boots and separate your toes,
ignore the compass wavering north/north west.
Quit trailing through the overcrowded streets
with tinkling bells, you child of Hare Krishna.
Hush. Unfurl your saffron robes. How sweet
the grass. And you, photographer of wars,
lie down and cap your lens. Ambassador,
take off your dancing shoes. There are no laws
by which you must abide oh blushing boy
with Stanley knife, no county magistrates
are waiting here to dress you down: employ
yourself with cutting up these wild flowers
as you like. Sous chef with baby guinea fowl
to stuff, surveillance officer with hours
to fill, and anorexic weighing up a meal,
lie down. Girl riding to an interview,
turn back before they force you to reveal
your hidey holes. Apprentice pharmacist,
leave carousels of second generation
happy pills. The long term sad. And journalist
with dreams, forget the man from Lancashire
who lost his tongue, the youth who found it,
kept it quivering in a matchbox for a year.