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Fiona Sampson

After proust

How the violin works over these coloured intervals the piano proffers like a frame for thought to clamber on violin is voice of course but harmony is thought as voice is thought at another moment or in another

place so the violin labouring from a different room inside the building reaches as if for a truth

and then repeats itself saying what was said before in another tone thought moving through cadences and through the open windows of an August evening as if someone were speaking on and on in the last evening warmth

New music

Suddenly this new music – a chainsaw droning in the wood like the queen wasp yesterday at the window seeming to

eat the glass the saw eating the shaking tree as if fury could clear everything away fear and frustration tidy in a pile of creamy sawdust –or is it the piled logs that say things have changed here’s a space where there was something and where now only the sky stays on to chuck down light as if relinquishing something long withheld which turns out to be no mystery –some die and some of us go on into the familiar of our own end and if

the path is sand this dry spring at least it will hold our footprints

Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer. Published in thirty-seven languages, she’s received international awards in the US, Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the English Association and Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust, she’s received an MBE from the Queen For Services to Literature and published twenty-seven books.