Blog
6th January, 2017
Friday Poem – ‘Boredom: An Appreciation’, Katrina Naomi
This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me.
‘Boredom: An Appreciation’ perfectly captures the glory of days lazily spent. In stark contrast to the darker themes present in this collection, Katrina Naomi here paints a luxurious portrait of the strange joys mundane activities can provide.
The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is Katrina Naomi’s second collection, and paints a heartfelt and tragi-comic picture of a fraught childhood and adolescence. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Interspersed with the awful there are moments of humour, of contemplation, redemption, realisation: these are pointed, lively and always entertaining poems.
Boredom: An Appreciation
The heavy-shouldered clock of morning,
those slender hands never reaching
past the hours of brown wallpaper.
I don’t have time for boredom now,
to stare at the gas in the fire,
as if I could study flames,
to let my thoughts drift on their thermal,
unharnessed, as if they were never mine –
never could be.
Might I long for a Westgate afternoon,
waiting for the yellow lights
of evening, knowing day had melted –
the dark toffee of it – to listen
to the hiss, the end of the cassette,
re-reading my diary, its brief entries.
And if I sit here long enough,
could I wonder where that jet goes
with its teatime, pinkish trail,
imagine being a passenger,
the tedium of that life,
while I bite the ends of my hair.
