I’m thrilled with today’s news that Carol Ann Duffy has been named Britain’s poet laureate; Duffy is the first woman to hold the post held by Tennyson and Ted Hughes (and the underrated John Betjeman.) In February 2006, I posted my favorite of her poems; here it is again. Sometimes, I mutter under my breath the final stanza — one of the more memorable in modern poetry.
Crush
The older she gets,
the more she awakes
with somebody’s face strewn in her head
like petals which once made a flower.
What everyone does
is sit by a desk
and stare at the view, till the time
where they live reappears. Mostly in words.
Imagine a girl
turning to see
love stand by a window, taller,
clever, anointed with sudden light.
Yes, like an angel then,
to be truthful now.
At first a secret, erotic, mute;
today a language she cannot recall.
And we’re all owed joy,
sooner or later.
The trick’s to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.
Hmm. I think I needed to read this. I must’ve missed it when you posted it before.
Oh, duh. I did miss it… It would’ve been a year before I took your class.