Borrowed Time (excerpt)
I feel a bit crazy tonight,
my mood heightened, unstable:
maybe because it's full moon,
or maybe because we're living
on borrowed time. But borrowed
from whom? Maybe the moon -
it could be the moon who allows
you to live beyond your due.
This morning the doctor said
he's amazed you're still alive.
I'm not. Why should you die?
Ageing (excerpt)
Since early middle-age
(say around forty)
I've been writing about ageing,
poems in many registers:
fearful, enraged or accepting
as I moved through the decades.
Now that I'm really old
there seems little left to say.
Pointless to bewail
the decline, bodily and mental;
undignified; boring
not to me only but everyone,
and ridiculous to celebrate
the wisdom supposedly gained
simply by staying alive.
- Nevertheless, to have faith
that you'll be adored as an ancient
might make it all worthwhile.
The Storm (excerpt)
Instead of a struggle with grief,
we were fighting the weather,
reduced to the ludicrous; instead of prayer,
a dry shelter was what seemed most important.
Water running across my hands, inside my sleeves,
I took the spade and being chief mourner,
made the first movement to bury you.
Archive Film Material (excerpt)
At first it seemed a bank of swaying flowers
wind blown beside a railway track, but then
I saw it was the turning heads of men
unloaded from the cattle trucks at Auschwitz.
- Ruth Fainlight
