Today is a day when we may all feel the hint of the ‘away and see’ part of life. Already at 8-30am there is a soft glow of slow sunshine on my lawn and the squirrels are busy at the bird table beating the feathered crew to what remains of yesterday’s food. There is a lifting of the spirits. This moment seems welcome to be here!
‘wingspan stretching a noun.’
This poem lifts you as you read it. It’s like loosening tired shoulders and cluttered minds. Kicking away the cliches, the half asleep acceptances of the ‘real’.
I suppose it’s like one of those poems you put next to your desk to make you think differently. For this is a ‘dare to be different’ poem. Duffy is encouraging us to think otherwise, to think in an ‘otherly’ direction as we look differently at our world and recognise the lightness of words.
The air between the spaces…Fixity is death. Freshen up your perspectives, smudge away at your horizons, dare to be different, to be otherwise. Spell your words with love Duffy avows…open your doors to the new..farewell to the tried and tested..
away and see…
Get on that holiday bus of language. Summer holiday, open sandals and a very floppy hat!!
Dr Janet Lewison
Away and see an ocean suck at a boiled sun
and say to someone things I’d blush even to dream.
Slip off your dress in a high room over the harbour.
Write to me soon.
New fruits sing on the flipside of night
in a market of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby stopping you dead, the peach in your palm respiring.
Taste it for me.
Away and see the things that words give a name to,the
flight
of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words
wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.
Spell them with love.
Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end,
hopeful.
Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,
horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the
future.
Ask him his name.
Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see
for yourself. Walk.Fly. Take a boat till land reappears,
altered forever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on.
G’on.
Away and see.