Carol Ann Duffy – selected poems1

Carol Ann Duffy is the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (May 2009 – May 2019).

From Standing Female Nude (1985)

Girl Talking page 2
Education for Leisure 3
Standing Female Nude 4
The Dolphins 5
A Healthy Meal 6
War Photographer 7
From Selling Manhattan (1987)
Recognition 8
Selling Manhattan 9
Stealing 10
Warming Her Pearls 11
Deportation 12
From The Other Country (1990)
Dream of a Lost Friend 13
Eley’s Bullet 14
In Your Mind 16
From Mean Time (1993)
Litany 17
Nostalgia 18
Valentine 19
From The World’s Wife (1999)
Queen Herod 20
Mrs Aesop 23
Eurydice 24

1
Unless otherwise noted, all poems are taken from: Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 2

Girl Talking

1 On our Eid2 day my cousin was sent to

2 the village. Something happened. We think it was pain.
3 She gave wheat to the miller and the miller
4 gave her flour. Afterwards it did not hurt,
5 so for a while she made chapatis. Tasleen,
6 said her friends, Tasleen, do come out with us.

7 They were in a coy near the swing. It’s like

8 a field. Sometimes we planted melons, spinach,
9 marrow, and there was a well. She sat on the swing.
10 They pushed her till she shouted Stop the swing,
11 then she was sick. Tasleen told them to find
12 help. She made blood beneath the mango tree.

13 Her mother held her down. She thought something

14 was burning her stomach. We paint our hands.
15 We visit. We take each other money.
16 Outside, the children played Jack-with-Five-Stones.
17 Each day she’d carried water from the well
18 into the Mosque. Men washed and prayed to God.

19 After an hour she died. Her mother cried.

20 They called a Holy Man. He walked from Dina
21 to Jhang Chak3. He saw her dead, then said
22 She went out at noon and the ghost took her heart.
23 From that day we were warned not to do this.
24 Baarh is a small red fruit. We guard our hearts.

2
Holiday that marks the end of Ramadan
3
Town in Punjab region of Pakistan
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 3

Education for Leisure

1 Today I am going to kill something. Anything.

2 I have had enough of being ignored and today
3 I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
4 a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

5 I squash a fly against a window with my thumb.

6 We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
7 another language and now the fly is in another language.
8 I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

9 I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half

10 the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
11 Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
12 knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

13 I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.

14 I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
15 Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
16 for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

17 There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio

18 and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
19 He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
20 The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 4

Standing Female Nude

1 Six hours like this for a few francs.

2 Belly nipple arse in the window light,
3 he drains the colour from me. Further to the right,
4 Madame. And do try to be still.
5 I shall be represented analytically and hung
6 in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo
7 at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art.

8 Maybe. He is concerned with volume, space.

9 I with the next meal. You’re getting thin,
10 Madame, this is not good. My breasts hang
11 slightly low, the studio is cold. In the tea-leaves
12 I can see the Queen of England gazing
13 on my shape. Magnificent, she murmurs,
14 moving on. It makes me laugh. His name

15 is Georges. They tell me he’s a genius.

16 There are times he does not concentrate
17 and stiffens for my warmth.
18 He possesses me on canvas as he dips the brush
19 repeatedly into the paint. Little man,
20 you’ve not the money for the arts I sell.
21 Both poor, we make our living how we can.

22 I ask him. Why do you do this? Because

23 I have to. There’s no choice. Don’t talk.
24 My smile confuses him. These artists
25 take themselves too seriously. At night I fill myself
26 with wine and dance around the bars. When it’s finished
27 he shows me proudly, lights a cigarette. I say
28 Twelve francs and get my shawl. It does not look like me.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 5

The Dolphins

1 World is what you swim in, or dance, it is simple.

2 We are in our element but we are not free.
3 Outside this world you cannot breathe for long.
4 The other has my shape. The other’s movement
5 forms my thoughts. And also mine. There is a man
6 and there are hoops. There is a constant flowing guilt.

7 We have found no truth in these waters,

8 no explanations tremble on our flesh.
9 We were blessed and now we are not blessed.
10 After travelling such space for days we began
11 to translate. It was the same space. It is
12 the same space always and above it is the man.

13 And now we are no longer blessed, for the world

14 will not deepen to dream in. The other knows
15 and out of love reflects me for myself.
16 We see our silver skin flash by like memory
17 of somewhere else. There is a coloured ball
18 we have to balance till the man has disappeared.

19 The moon has disappeared. We circle well-known grooves

20 of water on a single note. Music of loss forever
21 from the other’s heart which turns my own to stone.
22 There is a plastic toy. There is no hope. We sink
23 to the limits of this pool until the whistle blows.
24 There is a man and our mind knows we will die here.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 6

A Healthy Meal

1 The gourmet tastes the secret dreams of cows

2 tossed lightly in garlic. Behind the green door, swish
3 of oxtails languish on an earthen dish. Here are
4 wishbones and pinkies; fingerbowls will absolve guilt.

5 Capped teeth chatter to a kidney or at the breast

6 of something which once flew. These hearts knew
7 no love and on their beds of saffron rice they lie
8 beyond reproach. What is the claret like? Blood.

9 On table six, the language of tongues is braised

10 in armagnac4. The woman chewing suckling pig
11 must sleep with her husband later. Leg,
12 saddle and breast bleat against pure white cloth.

13 Alter calf to veal in four attempts. This is

14 the power of words; knife, tripe, lights, charcuterie.
15 A fat man orders his rare and a fine sweat
16 bastes his face. There are napkins to wipe the evidence

17 and sauces to gag the groans of abattoirs5. The menu

18 lists the recent dead in French, from which they order
19 offal6, poultry, fish. Meat flops in the jowls. Belch.
20 Death moves in the bowels. You are what you eat.

4
A kind of brandy
5
Slaughterhouses
6
Entrails and internal organs
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 7

War Photographer7

1 In his darkroom he is finally alone

2 with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
3 The only light is red and softly glows,
4 as though this were a church and he
5 a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
6 Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass. 8

7 He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

8 beneath his hands which did not tremble then
9 though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
10 to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
11 to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
12 of running children in a nightmare heat.

13 Something is happening. A stranger’s features

14 faintly start to twist before his eyes,
15 a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
16 of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
17 without words to do what someone must
18 and how the blood stained into the foreign dust.

19 A hundred agonies in black-and-white

20 from which his editor will pick out five or six
21 for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
22 with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
23 From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
24 he earns his living and they do not care.

7
Poem taken from: Duffy, Carol Ann. Standing Female Nude. Anvil, 1985, p. 51.
8
Bible, Isaiah 40:6
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 8

Recognition

1 Things get away from one.

2 I’ve let myself go, I know.
3 Children? I’ve had three
4 and don’t even know them.

5 I strain to remember a time

6 when my body felt lighter.
7 Years. My face is swollen
8 with regrets. I put powder on,

9 but it flakes off. I love him,

10 through habit, but the proof
11 has evaporated. He gets upset.
12 I tried to do all the essentials

13 on one trip. Foolish, yes,

14 but I was weepy all morning.
15 Quiche. A blond boy swung me up
16 in his arms and promised the earth.

17 You see, this came back to me

18 as I stood on the scales.
19 I wept. Shallots. In the window,
20 creamy ladies held a pose

21 which left me clogged and old.

22 The waste. I’d forgotten my purse,
23 fumbled; the shopgirl gaped at me,
24 compassionless. Claret. I blushed.

25 Cheese. Kleenex. It did happen.

26 I lay in my slip on wet grass,
27 laughing. Years. I had to rush out,
28 blind in a hot flush, and bumped

29 into an anxious, dowdy matron

30 who touched the cold mirror
31 and stared at me. Stared
32 and said I’m sorry sorry sorry.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 9

Selling Manhattan

1 All yours, Injun, twenty-four bucks’ worth of glass beads,

2 gaudy cloth. I got myself a bargain. I brandish
3 fire-arms and fire-water. Praise the Lord.
4 Now get your red ass out of here.

5 I wonder if the ground has anything to say.

6 You have made me drunk, drowned out
7 the world’s slow truth with rapid lies.
8 But today I hear again and plainly see. Wherever
9 you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.

10 I wonder if the spirit of the water has anything

11 to say. That you will poison it. That you
12 can no more own the rivers and the grass than own
13 the air. I sing with true love for the land;
14 dawn chant, the song of sunset, starlight psalm.

15 Trust your dreams. No good will come of this.

16 My heart is on the ground, as when my loved one
17 fell back in my arms and died. I have learned
18 the solemn laws of joy and sorrow, in the distance
19 between morning’s frost and firefly’s flash at night.

20 Man who fears death, how many acres do you need

21 to lengthen your shadow under the endless sky?
22 Last time, this moment, now, a boy feels his freedom
23 vanish, like the salmon going mysteriously
24 out to sea. Loss holds the silence of great stones.

25 I will live in the ghost of grasshopper and buffalo.

26 The evening trembles and is sad.

27 A little shadow runs across the grass
28 and disappears into the darkening pines.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 10

Stealing

1 The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman.

2 Midnight. He looked magnificent; a tall, white mute
3 beneath the winter moon. I wanted him, a mate
4 with a mind as cold as the slice of ice
5 within my own brain. I started with the head.

6 Better off dead than giving in, not taking

7 what you want. He weighed a ton; his torso,
8 frozen stiff, hugged to my chest, a fierce chill
9 piercing my gut. Part of the thrill was knowing
10 that children would cry in the morning. Life's tough.

11 Sometimes I steal things I don't need. I joy-ride cars

12 to nowhere, break into houses just to have a look.
13 I'm a mucky ghost, leave a mess, maybe pinch a camera.
14 I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob.
15 A stranger's bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this – Aah.

16 It took some time. Reassembled in the yard,

17 he didn't look the same. I took a run
18 and booted him. Again. Again. My breath ripped out
19 in rags. It seems daft now. Then I was standing
20 alone among lumps of snow, sick of the world.

21 Boredom. Mostly I'm so bored I could eat myself.

22 One time, I stole a guitar and thought I might
23 learn to play. I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once,
24 flogged it, but the snowman was the strangest.
25 You don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 11

Warming Her Pearls

for Judith Radstone9

1 Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress

2 bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
3 when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
4 round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

5 resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk

6 or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
7 whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
8 each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

9 She's beautiful. I dream about her

10 in my attic bed; picture her dancing
11 with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
12 beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

13 I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot,

14 watch the soft blush seep through her skin
15 like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
16 my red lips part as though I want to speak.

17 Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see

18 her every movement in my head … Undressing,
19 taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
20 for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

21 she always does … And I lie here awake,

22 knowing the pearls are cooling even now
23 in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
24 I feel their absence and I burn.

9
“inspired by a conversation with Judith about the practice of ladies' maids increasing the lustre of their mistresses' pearls by secreting them
beneath their clothes to be warmed by their skin” (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/feb/13/guardianobituaries.books)
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 12

Deportation10

1 They have not been kind here. Now I must leave,

2 the words I’ve learned for supplication,
3 gratitude, will go unused. Love is a look
4 in the eyes in any language, but not here,
5 not this year. They have not been welcoming.

6 I used to think the world was where we lived

7 in space, one country shining in big dark.
8 I saw a photograph when I was small.

9 Now I am Alien. Where I come from there are few jobs,

10 the young are sullen and do not dream. My lover
11 bears our child and I was to work here, find
12 a home. In twenty years we would say This is you
13 when you were a baby, when the plum tree was a shoot…

14 We will tire each other out, making our homes

15 in one another’s arms. We are not strong enough.

16 They are polite, recite official jargon endlessly.

17 Form F. Room 12. Box 6. I have felt less small
18 below mountains disappearing into cloud
19 than entering the Building of Exile. Hearse taxis
20 crawl the drizzling streets towards the terminal.

21 I am no one special. An ocean parts me from my love.

22 Go back. She will embrace me, ask what it was like.

23 Return. One thing – there was a space to write
24 the colour of her eyes. They have an apple here,
25 a bitter-sweet, which matches them exactly. Dearest,
26 without you I am nowhere. It was cold.

Dream of a Lost Friend

10
Poem taken from: Duffy, Carol Ann. Selling Manhattan. Anvil, 1987, p. 59.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 13

1 You were dead, but we met, dreaming,

2 before you had died. Your name, twice,
3 then you turned, pale, unwell. My dear,
4 my dear, must this be? A public building
5 where I’ve never been and, on the wall,
6 an AIDS poster. Your white lips. Help me.

7 We embraced, standing in a long corridor

8 which harboured a fierce pain neither of us felt yet.
9 The words you spoke were frenzied prayers
10 to Chemistry: or you laughed, a child-man’s laugh,
11 innocent, hysterical, out of your skull. It’s only
12 a dream, I heard myself saying, only a bad dream.

13 Some of our best friends nurture a virus, an idle,

14 charmed, purposeful enemy, and it dreams
15 they are dead already. In fashionable restaurants,
16 over the crudités, the healthy imagine a time
17 when all these careful moments will be dreamed
18 and dreamed again. You look well. How do you feel?

19 Then, as I slept, you backed away from me, crying

20 and offering a series of dates for lunch, waving.
21 I missed your funeral, I said, knowing you couldn’t hear
22 at the end of the corridor, thumbs up, acting.
23 Where there’s life … Awake, alive, for months I think of you
24 almost hopeful in a bad dream where you were long dead.

Eley’s Bullet11
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 14

1 Out walking in the fields, Eley found a bullet

2 with his name on it. Pheasants korred
3 and whirred at the sound of gunfire.
4 Eley’s dog began to whine. England
5 was turning brown at the edges. Autumn. Rime
6 in the air. A cool bullet in his palm.

7 Eley went home. He put the tiny missile

8 in a matchbox and put that next to a pistol
9 in the drawer of his old desk. His dog
10 sat at his feet by the coal fire as he drank
11 a large whisky, then another one, but this
12 was usual. Eley went up the stairs to his bath.

13 He was in love with a woman in the town. The water

14 was just right, slid over his skin as he gave out
15 a long low satisfied moan into the steam.
16 His telephone began to ring and Eley cursed,
17 then dripped along the hall. She was in a call-box.
18 She’d lied all afternoon and tonight she was free.

19 The woman was married. Eley laughed aloud

20 with apprehension and delight, the world
21 expanded as he thought of her, his dog
22 trembled under his hand. Eley knelt,
23 he hugged the dog till it barked. Outside, the wind
24 knew something was on and nudged at the clouds.

25 They lay in each other’s arms, as if what they had done

26 together had broken the pair of them. The woman
27 was half-asleep and Eley was telling himself
28 how he would spend a wish, if he could have only one
29 for the whole of his life. His fingers counted
30 the beads of her back as he talked in the dark.

31 At ten, Eley came into the bedroom with drinks.

32 She was combing her hair at the mirror. His eyes
33 seemed to hurt at the sight. She told him sorry,
34 but this was the last time. She tried to smile.
35 He stared, then said her words himself, the way
36 he’d spoken Latin as a boy. Dead language.

37 By midnight the moon was over the house, full

38 and lethal, and Eley alone. He went to his desk
39 with a bottle and started to write. Upstairs,
11
In the original text, this poem is before the “Dream of a Lost Friend.” The switch was made in this document so this poem would be on
consecutive visible pages.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 15

40 the dog sniffed at the tepid bed. Eley held

41 his head in his hands and wanted to cry,
42 but Beloved he wrote and forever and why.

43 Some men have no luck. Eley knew he’d as well

44 send her his ear as mail these stale words,
45 although he could taste her still. Nearby, a bullet
46 was there for the right moment and the right man.
47 He got out his gun, slowly, not even thinking,
48 and loaded it. Now he would choose. He paused.

49 He could finish the booze, sleep without dreams

50 with the morning to face, the loss of her
51 sore as the sunlight; or open his mouth
52 for a gun with his name on its bullet to roar
53 in his brains. Thunder or silence. Eley wished to God
54 he’d never loved. And then the frightened whimper of a dog.

In Your Mind
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 16

1 The other country, is it anticipated or half-remembered?

2 Its language is muffled by the rain which falls all afternoon
3 one autumn in England, and in your mind
4 you put aside your work and head for the airport
5 with a credit card and a warm coat you will leave
6 on the plane. The past fades like newsprint in the sun.

7 You know people there. Their faces are photographs

8 on the wrong side of your eyes. A beautiful boy
9 in the bar on the harbor serves you a drink – what? –
10 asks you if men could possibly land on the moon.
11 A moon like an orange drawn by a child. No.
12 Never. You watch it peel itself into the sea.

13 Sleep. The rasp of carpentry wakes you. On the wall,

14 a painting lost for thirty years renders the room yours.
15 Of course. You go to your job, right at the old hotel, left,
16 then left again. You love this job. Apt sounds
17 mark the passing of the hours. Seagulls. Bells. A flute
18 practising scales. You swap a coin for a fish on the way home.

19 Then suddenly you are lost but not lost, dawdling

20 on the blue bridge, watching six swans vanish
21 under your feet. The certainty of place turns on the lights
22 all over town, turns up the scent on the air. For a moment
23 you are there, in the other country, knowing its name.
24 And then a desk. A newspaper. A window. English rain.

Litany
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 17

1 The soundtrack then was a litany – candlewick

2 bedspread three piece suite display cabinet –
3 and stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles,
4 passing the catalogue. Pyrex. A tiny ladder
5 ran up Mrs Barr’s American Tan leg, sly
6 like a rumour. Language embarrassed them.

7 The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane

8 round polyester shirts, and then The Lounge
9 would seem to bristle with eyes, hard
10 as the bright stones in engagement rings,
11 and sharp hands poised over biscuits as a word
12 was spelled out. An embarrassing word, broken

13 to bits, which tensed the air like an accident.

14 This was the code I learnt at my mother’s knee, pretending
15 to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts,
16 and certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell.
17 The year a mass grave of wasps bobbed in a jam-jar;
18 a butterfly stammered itself in my curious hands.

19 A boy in the playground, I said, told me

20 to fuck off; and a thrilled, malicious pause
21 salted my tongue like an imminent storm. Then
22 uproar. I’m sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery,
23 sorry, Mrs Raine. Yes, I can summon their names.
24 My mother’s mute shame. The taste of soap.

Nostalgia
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 18

1 Those early mercenaries, it made them ill –

2 leaving the mountains, leaving the high, fine air
3 to go down, down. What they got
4 was money, dull crude coins clenched
5 in the teeth; strange food, the wrong taste,
6 stones in the belly; and the wrong sounds,
7 the wrong smells, the wrong light, every breath –
8 wrong. They had an ache here, Doctor,
9 they pined, wept, grown men. It was killing them.

10 It was given a name. Hearing tell of it,

11 there were those who stayed put, fearful
12 of a sweet pain in the heart; of how it hurt,
13 in that heavier air, to hear
14 the music of home – the sad pipes – summoning,
15 in the dwindling light of the plains,
16 a particular place – where maybe you met a girl,
17 or searched for a ball in long grass,
18 found it just as your mother called you in.

19 But the word was out. Some would never

20 fall in love had they not heard of love.
21 So the priest stood at the stile with his head
22 in his hands, crying at the workings of memory
23 through the colour of leaves, and the schoolteacher
24 opened a book to the scent of her youth, too late.
25 It was spring when one returned, with his life
26 in a sack on his back, to find the same street
27 with the same sign on the inn, the same bell
28 chiming the hour on the clock, and everything changed.

Valentine
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 19

1 Not a red rose or a satin heart.

2 I give you an onion.

3 It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
4 It promises light
5 like the careful undressing of love.

6 Here.
7 It will blind you with tears
8 like a lover.
9 It will make your reflection
10 a wobbling photo of grief.

11 I am trying to be truthful.

12 Not a cute card or a kissogram.

13 I give you an onion.

14 Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
15 possessive and faithful
16 as we are,
17 for as long as we are.

18 Take it.
19 Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
20 if you like.

21 Lethal.
22 Its scent will cling to your fingers,
23 cling to your knife.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 20

Queen Herod12

1 Ice in the trees.

2 Three Queen at the Palace gates,
3 dressed in furs, accented;
4 their several sweating, panting beasts,
5 laden for a long, hard trek,
6 following the guide and boy to the stables;
7 courteous, confident; oh, and with gifts
8 for the King and Queen of here – Herod 13, me –
9 in exchange for sunken baths, curtained beds,
10 fruit, the best of meat and wine,
11 dancers, music, talk –
12 as it turned out to be,
13 with everyone fast asleep, save me,
14 those vivid three –
15 till bitter dawn.

16 They were wise. Older than I.

17 They knew what they knew.
18 Once drunken Herod’s head went back,
19 they asked to see her,
20 fast asleep in her crib,
21 my little child.
22 Silver and gold,
23 the loose change of herself,
24 glowed in the soft bowl of her face.
25 Grace, said the tallest Queen.14
26 Strength, said the Queen with the hennaed hands.
27 The black Queen
28 made a tiny starfish of my daughter’s fist,
29 said Happiness; then stared at me,
30 Queen to Queen, with insolent lust.
31 Watch, they said, for a star in the East –
32 a new star
33 pierced through the night like a nail.
34 It means he’s here, alive, new-born.
35 Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.
36 The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t’adore.
37 The Marrying Kind. Adulterer. Bigamist.
38 The Wolf. The Rip. The Rake. The Rat.
39 The Heartbreaker. The Ladykiller. Mr Right.

12
Poem taken from: Duffy, Carol Ann. The World’s Wife. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 1999, pp. 7-10. Where stanzas break over page breaks,
the whole stanza is moved to the next page, in keeping with the tradition of the original text.
13
Herod the Great attempts to kill the infant Christ in the “Gospel According to Matthew” in the Bible after a visit from magi of the East.
14
The Magi are claimed, in Western tradition, to be Melchior of Persia, Caspar or Gaspar of India, and Balthasar of Babylon; though there is no
actual record of there being three. They are credited with bringing the Christ child gold, frankincense, and myrrh (three gifts).
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 21

40 My baby stirred,
41 suckled the empty air for milk,
42 till I knelt
43 and the black Queen scooped out my breast,
44 the left, guiding it down
45 to the infant’s mouth.
46 No man, I swore,
47 will make her shed one tear.
48 A peacock screamed outside.

49 Afterwards, it seemed like a dream.

50 The pungent camels
51 kneeling in the snow,
52 the guide’s rough shout
53 as he clapped his leather gloves,
54 hawked, spat, snatched
55 the smoky jug of mead
56 from the chittering maid –
57 she was twelve, thirteen.
58 I watched each turbaned Queen
59 rise like a god on the back of her beast.
60 And splayed that night
61 below Herod’s fusty bulk,
62 I saw the fierce eyes of the black Queen
63 flash again, felt her urgent warnings scald
64 my ear. Watch for a star, a star.
65 It means he’s here …

66 Some swaggering lad to break her heart,

67 some wincing Prince to take her name away,
68 and give a ring, a nothing, nowt in gold.
69 I sent for the Chief of Staff,
70 a mountain man
71 with a red scar, like a tick
72 to the mean stare of his eye.
73 Take men and horses,
74 knives, swords, cutlasses.
75 Ride East from here
76 and kill each mother’s son.
77 Do it. Spare not one.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 22

78
79
80 The midnight hour. The chattering stars
81 shivered in a nervous sky.
82 Orion to the South
83 who knew the score, who’d seen,
84 not seen, then seen it all before;
85 the yapping Dog Star at his heels.
86 High up in the West
87 a studded, diamond W15.
88 And then, as prophesied,
89 blatant, brazen, buoyant in the East –
and blue –
90 The Boyfriend’s Star.
91
92 We do our best,
we Queens, we mothers,
93 mothers of Queens.
94
95 We wade through blood
for our sleeping girls.
96 We have daggers for eyes.
97
98 Behind our lullabies,
the hooves of terrible horses
thunder and drum.

15
The five brightest stars of Cassiopeia.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 23

Mrs Aesop16

1 By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory. He was small,

2 didn’t prepossess. So he tried to impress. Dead men,
3 Mrs Aesop, he’d say, tell no tales. Well, let me tell you now
4 that the bird in his hand shat on his sleeve,
5 never mind the two worth less in the bush. Tedious.

6 Going out was the worst. He’d stand at our gate, look, then leap;
7 scour the hedgerows for a shy mouse, the fields
8 for a sly fox, the sky for one particular swallow
9 that couldn’t make a summer. The jackdaw, according to him,
10 envied the eagle. Donkeys would, on the whole, prefer to be lions.

11 On one appalling evening stroll, we passed an old hare

12 snoozing in a ditch – he stopped and made a note –
13 and then, about a mile further on, a tortoise, somebody’s pet,
14 creeping, slow as marriage, up the road. Slow
15 but certain, Mrs Aesop, wins the race. Asshole.

16 What race? What sour grapes? What silk purse,

17 sow’s ear, dog in a manger, what big fish? Some days,
18 I could barely keep awake as the story droned on
19 towards the moral of itself. Action, Mrs A., speaks louder
20 than words. And that’s another thing, the sex

21 was diabolical. I gave him a fable one night

22 about a little cock that wouldn’t crow, a razor-sharp axe
23 with a heart blacker than the pot that called the kettle.
24 I’ll cut off your tail, all right, I said, to save my face.
25 That shut him up. I laughed last, longest.

16
For a better understandings of this poem, review Aesop’s fables here: http://read.gov/aesop/001.html
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 24

Eurydice1718

1 Girls, I was dead and down

2 in the Underworld, a shade,
3 a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
4 It was a place where language stopped,
5 a black full stop, a black hole
6 where words had to come to an end.
7 And end they did there,
8 last words,
9 famous or not.
10 It suited me down to the ground.

11 So imagine me there,
12 unavailable,
13 out of this world,
14 then picture my face in that place
15 of Eternal Repose,
16 in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe
17 from the kind of man
18 who follows her round
19 writing poems,
20 hovers about
21 while she reads them,
22 calls her His Muse,
23 and once sulked for a night and a day
24 because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
25 Just picture my face
26 when I heard –
27 Ye Gods –
28 a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death’s door.

29 Him.
30 Big O.
31 Larger than life.
32 With his lyre
33 and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.

17
Poem taken from: Duffy, Carol Ann. The World’s Wife. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 1999, pp. 58-61. As before, stanzas are kept complete.
18
Read two versions of the original myth here: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/eurydice/eurydicemyth.html
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 25

34 Things were different back then.

35 For the men, verse-wise,
36 Big O was the boy. Legendary.
37 The blurb on the back of his books claimed
38 that animals,
39 aardvark to zebra,
40 flocked to his side when he sang,
41 fish leapt in their shoals
42 at the sound of his voice,
43 even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
44 wept wee, silver tears.

45 Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself,

46 I should know.)
47 And given my time all over again,
48 rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself
49 than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess, etc., etc.

50 In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead.

51 But the Gods are like publishers,

52 usually male,
53 and what you doubtless know of my tale
54 is the deal.

55 Orpheus19 strutted his stuff.

56 The bloodless ghosts were in tears.

57 Sisyphus20 sat on his rock for the first time in years.
58 Tantalus21 was permitted a couple of beers.

59 The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.

60 Like it or not,
61 I must follow him back to our life –
62 Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife –
63 to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,
64 octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,
65 elegies, limericks, villanelles,
66 histories, myths…

19
Legendary poet and musician in mythology
20
Underworld punishment: eternally pushing a rock up a hill
21
Underworld punishment: standing next to a fruit tree and pool but both recede when he tries to eat or drink
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 26

67 He’d been told that he mustn’t look back

68 or turn round,
69 but walk steadily upwards,
70 myself right behind him,
71 out of the Underworld
72 into the upper air that for me was the past.
73 He’d been warned
74 that one look would lose me
75 for ever and ever.

76 So we walked, we walked.
77 Nobody talked.

78 Girls, forget what you’ve read.

79 It happened like this –
80 I did everything in my power
81 to make him look back.
82 What did I have to do, I said,
83 to make him see we were through?
84 I was dead. Deceased.
85 I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.
86 Past my sell-by date…
87 I stretched out my hand
88 to touch him once
89 on the back of the neck.
90 Please let me stay.
91 But already the light saddened from purple to grey.

92 It was an uphill schlep

93 from death to life
94 and with every step
95 I willed him to turn.
96 I was thinking of filching the poem
97 out of his cloak,
98 when inspiration finally struck.
99 I stopped, thrilled.
100 He was a yard in front.
101 My voice shook when I spoke –
102 Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece.
103 I’d love to hear it again…

104 He was smiling modestly

105 when he turned,
106 when he turned and he looked at me.

107 What else?

108 I noticed he hadn’t shaved.
 Duffy (cohort 2019) 27

109 I waved once and was gone.

110 The dead are so talented.

111 The living walk by the edge of a vast lake
112 near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.