MONO ISSUE 1 PDF FLIPBOOK - Flipbook - Page 59
OLDER THAN HER STONE
(for Sylvia Plath)
by Hadley-James Hoyles
She was taller than I
and more immolated
in her obsession. So it seems
strange, that she should just lie here
in a plot I could dig
in a good two hours.
That sits, studded by the spades of her craft.
Though she typed, and I added one.
That her head is stoned by a crown of blocks
of Abraham’s children’s customs.
A statement to Otto, a rebuttal
stretching back across millennia, and so bound to
catch him on the way?
She was older than I
but not by much.
The scratching on her testaments
are older than us both.
Replies to her own ebullient passions
which hold age like a fibber gilded with diamond.
She is faster than I
and to kneel would feel
to violate. I stand
with my panicked words, scrabbling
through the light breeze
and the soft green haze
of the sacred Capital.
The strands of her hair
streaming through the last half
century are not here.
Her artefacts, blasted into
the quiet pregnancies of thought
across the greater part of
the world are not here.
The honour saddles in between
the threads of my nerves
to see her relics in the heart
of my land, and to add my own.
But I must ask,
after all the stone and sun
why is she here?
59
