Two Girls Singing
It neither was the words nor yet the tune.
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener or no listener at all.
As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
5 in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.
So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together
10 and it wasn’t the words or tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.
Iain Crichton Smith
Old Woman
1 And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate
as an old mare might droop across a fence
to the dull pastures of its ignorance.
Her husband held her upright while he prayed
5 to God who is all-forgiving to send down
some angel somewhere who might land perhaps
in his foreign wings among the gradual crops.
She munched, half dead, blindly searching the spoon.
Outside, the grass was raging. There I sat
10 imprisoned in my pity and my shame
that men and woman having suffered time
should sit in such a place, in such a state
and wished to be away, yes, to be far away
with athletes, heroes, Greeks or Roman men
15 who pushed their nitter spears into a vein
and would not spend an hour with such decay.
“Pray God,” he said, “we ask you, God,” he said.
The bowed back was quiet. I saw the teeth
tighten their grip around a delicate death.
20 And nothing moved within the knotted head
but only a few poor veins as one might see
vague wishless seaweed floating on a tide
of all the salty waters where had died
too many waves to mark two more or three.
Iain Crichton Smith
