Bordeaux Bay

Bordeaux Bay
Bordeaux Bay by Guernsey-based artist Tony Taylor

Friday, 17 March 2023

SPECIAL DELIVERY

Another Sonnet-style poem, in that it's 14 lines and concludes with a rhyming couplet. It's not autobiographical. Often I like to use the 'poetic voice' in much the same way as an actor might 'inhabit' the character that he or she is playing to deliver a poem based largely on imagination.


















LETTER


The letter that arrived today was brief:

its message, neatly written, was concise.

The cold words, terse and factual, brought grief.

It had been redirected once or twice

for I have changed addresses as I’ve fled

my former life, attempting to forget

the angry ghosts of us, to seek, instead,

a place where I’d no longer be beset

by self-reproach, the pain of the divorce,

where I could start again, slough off the past

but, as I read the leaden words, remorse

burned through me and a self-disgust amassed

as I imagine tumours might expand

beneath the rib-cage, leaving me unmanned.


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