Sinead Morrissey
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Walberberg Seminar 2006: Home? |
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Leaving Flensburg
This city settled on you in layers of days
that brought a grounding with them, that sense of knowing
where your feet belonged. Memory built the way
in which you recognised the place, decided how much your going
would cost: a few confused days in the next stop-over, or dreamscape
for a year.
This one was a hard one to guess, because although
your feet knew all the town's directions,
and tapped their way through the map they'd got to know,
they never saw their own reflection
in the Baltic harbour: the thousand jellyfish that swarm in in September
made the glass shiver, and the sky disappear.
All the same, you had the Glucksburg Autumn, days when the gold
set loose in the sky seemed almost like a crime. You feared
the winter, but it came, and the darkness and cold
brought with them skies of stars, high over Schleswig-Holstein, singing in space.
Above all, the shipyard rocketed the price --
freezing and full of sad men welding steel. It was almost dark
as the finished freighter slid out to the sea, and the thin ice
cracked in the shapes of flowers, all the way to Denmark .
It was then you knew there'd be dreams for years.
Sinead Morrissey
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