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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