23rd September, 2016

Friday Poem – ‘What the Dead Don’t Know’, Anne-Marie Fyfe

Our Friday Poem this week is taken from Anne-Marie Fyfe’s latest collection, House of Small Absences.

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

What the Dead Don’t Know

Grows quickly, daily, from the perimeter
of a postage stamp, until it’s twice the size
of Norway, and growing fast.

What the deceased can’t understand
is why they don’t still hear from us
day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

What the departed don’t see
is how the lead story has moved on.

What the dead won’t say
is more or less what they didn’t say
when they had the chance. Diplomacy,
tact, reserve: these things endure.

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