Poem
Jo Shapcott
BARBICAN AUDIENCE
BARBICAN AUDIENCE
BARBICAN AUDIENCE
It’s a hot night. We walk the highwalkfrom the tube. The concrete walls
seep warmth and we smell
garden flowers, hear city church bells,
loiter in the odd sweet spot until
the sound of water falling
tugs us on. Lakeside, we know
if there’s a muse
of concrete, she lives
here, inside these buildings
made of crushed Welsh
granite and of rain. Through
the doors and now our ears
are caves, our minds
cathedrals of flash and glow,
until we are beside ourselves and
our hearts have softened in our bodies
and when we go back out the street is silk.
© 2009, Jo Shapcott
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Jo Shapcott
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1953)
Jo Shapcott was born in 1953 in London and educated in Dublin and Oxford and at Harvard. She has worked extensively in universities and in arts education, including at the Arts Council and the Southbank Centre. In 1985 she won first prize in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition with ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’, which was later included in her first collecti...
Poems
Poems of Jo Shapcott
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BARBICAN AUDIENCE
It’s a hot night. We walk the highwalkfrom the tube. The concrete walls
seep warmth and we smell
garden flowers, hear city church bells,
loiter in the odd sweet spot until
the sound of water falling
tugs us on. Lakeside, we know
if there’s a muse
of concrete, she lives
here, inside these buildings
made of crushed Welsh
granite and of rain. Through
the doors and now our ears
are caves, our minds
cathedrals of flash and glow,
until we are beside ourselves and
our hearts have softened in our bodies
and when we go back out the street is silk.
BARBICAN AUDIENCE
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