Event
Southend Poetry Group 5th October

Bio

Katy Evans-Bush is the author of Egg Printing Explained (Salt Publishing, June 2011), and the earlier Me and the Dead (Salt, 2008) and Oscar & Henry (Rack Press, 2010). She edits Salt's online magazine, Horizon Review, blogs at Baroque in Hackney, and is a poetry tutor for the Poetry School and others. http://katyevansbush.com

Poem

The Night Is Dark

You started with an image of yourself,
reversed, as in a mirror. It was 3
a.m. The night was dark, the streets were full
of thieves: thieves of your heart, put there by you.

The mirror spoke in wee-hour blandishments,
hoping you wouldn’t see what it held up
hooded in its gloved fist: the ravished raptor,
the fretted, blinded image-within-an-image.

The falcon lives without love. And therefore
you love the falcon. You pity his misfortune,
unable to see him, since you are also hooded,
and this unsilvering of the mirror’s yours.

it’s yours alone: the empty spots are spreading.
You wake and walk the street, you hear strange noises
And take them, first, for birdsong. It’s too late.
It’s 3 a.m. You’ve made what you’re afraid of.