Imagine living in a strange, dark city for twenty years.
There are some dismal dwellings on the east side
and one of them is yours. On the landing, you hear
your foreign accent echo down the stairs. You think
in a language of your own and talk in theirs.
Then you are writing home. The voice in your head
recites the letter in a local dialect; behind that
is the sound of your mother singing to you,
all that time ago, and now you do not know
why your eyes are watering and what’s the word for this.
You use the public transport. Work. Sleep. Imagine one night
you saw a name for yourself sprayed in red
against a brick wall. A hate name. Red like blood.
It is snowing on the streets, under the neon lights,
as if this place were coming to bits before your eyes.
And in the delicatessen, from time to time, the coins
in your palm will not translate. Inarticulate,
because this is not home, you point at fruit. Imagine
that one of you says Me not know what these people mean.
It like they only go to bed and dream. Imagine that.
This poem has remained me since I first read it and just now in the light of NLP I have realised one reason it has affected me so powerfully- Duffy brings in all the senses in order to evoke a loneliness that is marrow deep. More later…but wanted to note down the impact of this poem and its recognition of the responsibility of the imperative to ‘imagine’. Duffy commands us to pay attention, to really imagine what it might be like to be some one else…how often to we pay real fully present attention to an/other?