Poem of the week: Fiona Moore – ‘The Shirt’
At the heart of this deeply-felt debut are a number of poems haunted by the premature death of her partner. A poem like “The Shirt” takes an ordinary object and shows how it is fraught with the circumstances of his passing and yet also evokes more tender moments.
I didn’t find it for months, your shirt
bundled into a corner in the airing cupboard.
I shook it out. It had been cut
with long cuts, all the way up the sleeves
and up the front, so it looked like a plan
of something about to be put together.
They must have had to work so fast to
save you there was no time to unbutton it.
An office shirt, because that’s where
it happened. The thin stripes slashed through –
terrifying, unprecedented – a reminder
of everything I wanted to forget.
I’d washed it afterwards, not knowing what to do
with it, or that in three weeks the same thing
would happen to another shirt, a favourite,
dull cotton whose thick weave made it look
as if all the pink shell-grains of sand
had come together on one beach,
a shirt for a gentle hug; and from then on,
nothing happened that we would forget.
You can borrow The Only Reason for Time by Fiona Moore from the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. Tel: 0131-557 2876, e-mail [email protected], or see www.spl.org.uk for details.