Marilyn Longstaff

Figment

Fragment found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, between the pages of Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’

My stuffed-shirt arm weighs heavy on this paper.
My desk draws me here, folds me into the pages,
chains me in the vellum shelves.

I hold my pen and I dip it in the ink.
All I write is this, ‘Dearest,
Mrs. Jenkin’s guest-house porridge lies like millstone grit in my stomach’.

I want to write,
‘My love, yellow and green light shards
stab at the gulf between us.

I think of you in that grey blue waste,
the empty space that strings Craster, Bamburgh, Berwick
the thin line we walked between sea and sand….’

24^th August 1919

Previously published in Rewriting The Map (Vane Women press 2003) and Raiment (Smokestack Books 2010)

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