Personal Choice Volume 2 No.43

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night

and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say

it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing

an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine

the dark hills I would have to cross

to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

 Carol Ann Duffy

Dame Carol Ann Duffy (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009,[4] and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet laureate, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in accessible language.