The Friday Poem on 28/10/22
We chose ‘Quellenstraße, 1100’ by Kathryn Gray to be our Friday Poem this week for its dreamy, filmic quality. We love the way the poem starts with such a clear and beautifully rendered memory, then pulls out to take in the bigger picture, circling around issues of spirituality and belief, before landing gently back down on that same February day. The poem asks more questions than it answers, but the process of interrogating memory has its own rewards, and after reading it we feel somehow changed.
Quellenstraße, 1100
February—and I was young.
Spring Street! My blue bag was swinging
in uncommon warmth, even the shadowed
shapes of pavement under awnings
seemed ripe with a peculiar kindness
and promise. The snows, at last, had gone,
and this new street was my own.
I was so small, walking the street
in casual desire and joy. Linden! Linden!
the heart wants to cry,
and end it there.
But that would be a happy fiction.
Then, I did not know
how far I would have to go, how long alone;
not even when I came upon the febrile
water from that fractured main
—tableau of wonder in such sun,
merely. Two nuns
stood smiling in their placid certainties.
Spring Street again!
I have thought about it often down
the years, not that in the grand scheme
any of this matters. Too much has
happened since. Why do we remember
what we remember? How do we know
what makes us keep notice, waiting
on the things I no longer believe in—
immanence, for one—holding me
so tenderly now in that February day,
when I was young?
