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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?

Kathryn Gray‘s The Never-Never (Seren, 2004) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A pamphlet, Flowers, appeared from Rack Press in 2017. Her second collection, Hollywood or Home, will be published by Seren in 2023.

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