What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Reports of my survival may be exaggerated

Written by the poet Alan Jenkins in memory of Marie Colvin, his friend.

.

How can you be lying there?

Immodestly, among the rubble

When we want you to be here

In some other kind of trouble –

.

Luffing up, in irons, perhaps,

Just downstream from the Dove,

Lost in South London, without maps,

Or capsized in love.

.

What’s keeping you? A kind of dare?

Come back and tell us how you stayed

One step ahead, how you gave fear

The slip, how you were not afraid –

.

As we are. Look – here’s my idea.

Come back – this time, for good.

Leave your flak jacket and your gear

In that burnt-out neighbourhood,

.

And fly home, via Paris. You’ll be met.

I’ll buy a bottle from the corner store,

Like old times. You can have a cigarette.

Rie, get up off that bloodstained floor!

.

***

.

Tonight you threw your thin brown arm

Around my shoulders, and you said

(There was this unearthly calm)

‘Can’t you take in that I am dead?

.

'Learn to expect the unexpected turn

Of the tide, the unmarked reef,

The rock that should be off the stern

On which we come to grief?

.

'The lies, the ignorance and hate –

The bigger picture? No safe mooring there,

In Chechnya or Chiswick Eyot.

Those nights I drank my way out of despair,

.

'And filling ashtrays filed the copy

You would read – or not read – with

A brackish taste and your first coffee

Contending on your tongue; while Billy Smith,

.

'My street cat rescued from Jerusalem,

Barged in, shouting, from his wars…

As many lives as his – and now I’ve used them.

I wish I’d made it back to yours.’  

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