Poem: neither black nor white

11:55am Monday 1st November 2004

This poem was a commission for Wordmarket Word Party 3. Poet Laureate Lucy Crispin wrote the poem neither black nor white and read it at the event.

Words: they limber-up in pens, recline so sweetly
on shared pillows; they die in chalk motes
circling in a shaft of light, get lost in noisy rooms
or dashed against the walls of the cicatriced heart.Words flicker at us from screens, from signs
> and shops and laptops; they abseil down
from billboards and come hustling out of
phones. They loiter in gangs, too,kick their heels in the limitless ether,
slump sullen in Options 1, 2, 4 (not taken):
they are assaulted, abused, abandoned
out on contract to Mammon. Like refugeeswords squat, unclaimed, behind the eyes
of the frightened; they are shouted down
by work and booze and busyness, or sent away,
dismissed, as just too hard to bear.Yet words may also be a salve, a welcoming:
they can be a chinking drink on a hot day,
a river in spate, an intoxication like champagne.
Words bear their bright fruit in fading ink,the stored e-mail, the message you play again
and again, grinning, letting hope grow, dart
its white-gold all through you. Words may be
a longed-for listening-to, a purging, the cureof your soul: words can find you in the dark,
create the spaces where we may meet and share.
Words might even be a bewildered poet
reading in a hall in Cumbria as rain shatters itselfagainst windows a poet fearing self-revelation,
perhaps, but humbled at being heard. For words,
well-used, efface themselves, and we may see what lives
(of course) between, behind, beyond the lines.

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