We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

14.8.25

Stopping Time

 Prison Suicide 1982


You had to go. I know you had to go. 

How could you have stayed, to moulder? 


(Would you have mouldered? I don’t know.

I know nothing. I know I know nothing.)


What good would it have done you to stay, 

seeing, only from Inside, the way the world 


would move, open out, the whole vast realm

of the Internet happening so soon – ten years


or thereabouts, in Australia. We might have sent 

emails! Would that have been allowed? What


do prisoners do now? How do the screws

keep track of words going in and out?


I don’t, I discover, see you ever getting 

away. Well, maybe when you were very old.


I’m old now. You’d always have been

younger. As it is, you are forever young –


you who grew old as time, in the time you 

served. At last you made time serve you,


cutting it off suddenly, interrupting 

no, not time so much as that place


where They wanted you to stay. Where,

having freed yourself, strangely you do stay.




Find the back story in my memoir, Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of darkness and light. Available as paperback from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. Soon to be available as an ebook on Amazon.



2 comments:

  1. Just a big, big sigh....that last line sits so heavily there....as does the I know I know nothing....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah well. It's just what I live with, which still seeks expression now and then. There are much worse things to live with than the knowledge of having given and received both love and – along with everything else – much joy. joy. It does help, too, that you, my friend, express such understanding.

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