In That Year
by Kim Moore
And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.
And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.
And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.
And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.
And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.
And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me.
And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness.
And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.
From Poetry News (Summer 2014). Reproduced with kind permission from The Poetry Society.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2015
About Kim Moore
Kim Moore (b 1981) teaches the trumpet to schoolchildren in Cumbria for three days a week, works as a freelance writer the other two.
Her first collection The Art of Falling was published by Seren in 2015. Her pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and went on to be shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award and was a runner up in the Lakeland Book of the Year. She was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010 and an Eric Gregory Award in 2011. She is one of five UK poets chosen to take part in Versopolis, a European Poetry Platform aimed at creating opportunities for emerging European poets.
‘In That Year’, the poem shortlisted for Best Single Poem is part of a sequence of poems called ‘How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping’ which explores domestic violence within a relationship. It is the first poem in the sequence – which forms part of The Art of Falling. “It sets out a lot of the ideas that are explored throughout the rest of the sequence,” she says, highlighting “the use of animals, birds, insects and the body to explore issues of power and control.”
