Listening for Lost People
by Denise Riley
Still looking for lost people – look unrelentingly.
‘They died’ is not an utterance in the syntax of life
where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them
not minding if the still living turn away, casually.
Winds ruck up its skin so the sea tilts from red-blue
to blue-red: into the puckering water go his ashes
who was steadier than these elements. Thickness
of some surviving thing that sits there, bland. Its
owner’s gone nor does the idiot howl – while I’m
unquiet as a talkative ear. Spring heat, a cherry
tree’s fresh bronze leaves fan out and gleam – to
converse with shades, yourself become a shadow.
The souls of the dead are the spirit of language:
you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.
From Say Something Back. Reproduced with kind permission from Picador.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem Written
Say Something Back
Denise Riley
About Denise Riley
Denise Riley was born in Carlisle and lives in London. Her books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother [1983], ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History [1988], The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow [2012]. Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair, 1996), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 [with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, 2017] and two Selected Poems (2000, 2020).
