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featured poet – Katherine Gallagher

Passengers to the City

This morning she is travelling
eyes steeled on her knitting,
while the man next to her
from time to time turns his head,
glances briefly at the fiery wool
then looks away.
 
He is silent as a guard, and she
never speaks. Are they together, some pair
perfectly joined by silence?
Or are they today’s complete strangers?
 
I’ll never know, left simply
to knit them together – characters in a story,
a middle-aged couple on a train
waiting for love’s fable to happen to them,
for their old lives to be swept aside
changed, changed – as she keeps knitting,
bumping him occasionally,
at which he shrugs, turns his head quickly
not like a lover, but content.
 

Katherine Gallagher

first published in collection Passengers to the City, 1985, Hale & Iremonger;
later in Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems (pbk & hbk), 2010, Arc Publications

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