Tea

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid steams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions — sugar? milk? —
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say,
but it’s any tea, for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes,
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

Carol Ann Duffy

Text

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird
We text, text, text
our significant words
I re-read your first,
your second, your third
looking for the small xx
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.
I try to picture your hands
their image is blurred.
Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy

Looking for first light

Homesick

When we love, when we tell ourselves we do,
we are pining for first love, somewhen,
before we thought of wanting it. When we rearrange
the rooms we end up living in, we are looking
for first light, the arrangement of light,
that time, before we knew to call it light.

Or talk of music, when we say
we cannot talk of it, but play again
C major, A flat minor, we are straining
for first sound, what we heard once,
then, in lost chords, wordless languages.

What country do we come from? This one?
The one where sun burns
when we have night. The one
the moon chills; elsewhere, ?

Why is our love imperfect,
music only echo of itself,
the light wrong?

We scratch in dust with sticks,
dying of homesickness
for when, where, what.

Carol Ann Duffy

Name

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.

Carol Ann Duffy

This is what it is like, in words

Words, Wide Night
Carol Ann Duffy

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I am singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La la la la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you
and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Never Go Back

In the bar where the living dead drink all day

and a jukebox reminisces in a cracked voice

there is nothing to say.  You talk for hours

in agreed motifs, anecdotes shuffled and dealt

from a well-thumbed pack, snapshots.  The smoky mirrors

flatter;  your ghost buys a round for the parched,

old faces of the past.  Never return

to the space where you left time pining till it died.

Outside, the streets tear litter in their thin hands,

a tired wind whistles through the blackened stumps of houses

at a limping dog.  God, this is an awful place

says the friend, the alcoholic, whose head is a negative

of itself.  You listen and nod, bereaved.  Baby,

what you owe to this place is unpayable

in the only currency you have.  So drink up.  Shut up,

then get them in again.  Again.  And never go back.

Carol Ann Duffy

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

"Because of its unique and distinctive sound, the (Shipping Forecast) broadcasts have an appeal beyond those solely interested in nautical weather. The waters around the British Isles are divided into sea areas, also known as weather areas and many listeners find the well-known repetition of the names of the sea areas almost hypnotic, particularly during the bedtime (for Britain) broadcast at 00:48 UK time."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast

Watch/listen to a Shipping Forecast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnfywzFE63s

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy
And this explains it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8383178.stm
....................................................................................

The Mother

The Virgin Punishing the Infant
After the painting by Max Ernst

He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy,
but I am God. Joseph kept away, carving himself
a silent Pinocchio out in the workshed. He said
he was a simple man and hadn't dreamed of this.

She grew anxious in that second year, would stare
at stars saying Gabriel? Gabriel? Your guess.
The village gossiped in the sun. The child was solitary,
his wide and solemn eyes could fill your head.

After he walked, our normal children crawled. Our wives
were first resentful, then superior. Mary's child
would bring her sorrow...better far to have a son
who gurgled nonsense at your breast. Googoo. Googoo.

But I am God. We heard him through the window,
heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw
was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered
why the infant did not cry. And why the Mother did.

Carol Ann Duffy
Page 51, Selected Poems.