Poem
Helen Dunmore
Litany
Litany
Litany
For the length of time it takes a bruise to fadefor the heavy weight on getting out of bed,
for the hair’s grey, for the skin’s tired grain,
for the spider naevus and drinker’s nose
for the vocabulary of palliation and Macmillan
for friends who know the best funeral readings,
for the everydayness of pain, for waiting patiently
to ask the pharmacist about your medication
for elastic bandages and ulcer dressings,
for knowing what to say
when your friend says how much she still misses him,
for needing a coat although it is warm,
for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,
for the strange pity you feel
when told off by the blank sure faces
of the young who own and know everything,
for the bare flesh of the next generation,
for the word ‘generation’, which used to mean nothing.
© 2007, Helen Dunmore
From: Glad of These Times
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Northumberland
From: Glad of These Times
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Northumberland
Helen Dunmore
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)
Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire and studied at the University of York. She began to write poems as a child, and has published nine collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Glad of These Times (2007). Her second collection, The Sea Skater, won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; The Raw Garden was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and her collection of poems for childr...
Poems
Poems of Helen Dunmore
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Litany
For the length of time it takes a bruise to fadefor the heavy weight on getting out of bed,
for the hair’s grey, for the skin’s tired grain,
for the spider naevus and drinker’s nose
for the vocabulary of palliation and Macmillan
for friends who know the best funeral readings,
for the everydayness of pain, for waiting patiently
to ask the pharmacist about your medication
for elastic bandages and ulcer dressings,
for knowing what to say
when your friend says how much she still misses him,
for needing a coat although it is warm,
for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,
for the strange pity you feel
when told off by the blank sure faces
of the young who own and know everything,
for the bare flesh of the next generation,
for the word ‘generation’, which used to mean nothing.
From: Glad of These Times
Litany
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