Mute
After T. S. Eliot
I’m holding out my hair like it’s a snake – a slow
loop from wrist to wrist. This is how I string my bow: begin softly,
pianissimo, before the great crescendo rings.
I tighten these here million strings
and strum – a cricket singing to the night: why exactly, no one knows,
but still they stop and listen to the whisper music I make,
me and my choir of bats, my tiny kites who I keep near, tied
with atom-wide plaits. This is supposedly a waste land.
People walk past arm in arm across the square, and throw
down centimes like coppery snow. I smell jasmine and basil on the air,
and as my orchestral chaos grows I open my mouth to sing, to shout,
but of course only a wheeze comes out. (Roll up, roll up for the human squeeze
box, silence incarnate, the fallen goddess Vox, hyacinthine, nocturne,
pipistrelle-haloed, rosemary, time).
This is me in the violet light (cubist portrait, sgraffito, aquarelle), and it is a whisper
symphony cos my larynx doesn’t work quite right.
Flo Reynolds is a student of English Literature at UEA, knitter and beekeeper, proud poet and secret songwriter. She has a debilitating obsession with Virginia Woolf, and when not reading, writing, knitting or keeping bees, she blogs at literania.tumblr.com.