The Friday Poem on 16/12/22
We chose ‘Ping’ by Martyn Crucefix to be our Friday Poem this week. The short lines — some only three syllables long — float down the page in much the same way as the snowflakes they describe, slowing our reading and giving the poem a delicate, disjointed quality. The bright notification tone of the phone contrasts with the soft shuffle of the falling snow and serves to emphasise the atmosphere of strangeness and disconnection. Crucefix explores the way technology is now so often used to capture moments in time, and how it ends up mediating the distances between us. We think the poem is a gentle plea to reconnect, not just with each other but also with the natural world, to pause, to pay attention and to listen.
Ping
I will talk of course
but mostly I listen
and at lunchtime
snowflakes crashing down
onto London tarmac
though you’d hardly
call this snow
perhaps even sleet
yet something more
fleecy than hailstones
is making a noise
in the instant of falling
a kind of shuffling
one thing on another
as the waitress runs
to the plate-glass door
where she holds out
her mobile phone
for a moment
and presses record
because it’s out there
and worth it—a strange
shuffling swoosh
this muttering noise
gets whatsapped
to her older sister
an exclamatory caption
pings on her phone
where it lies face down
on a cluttered desk
for a moment staring
up at dark clouds
that have drifted over
Manchester’s river
warily she stops
what she’s at to listen
