Miles Away
#Midnight Poem By Carol Ann Duffy
Miles Away By Carol Ann Duffy
I want you and you are not here.
I pause in this garden, breathing the colour thought is before language into still air.
Even your name is a pale ghost and, though i exhale it again and again, it will not stay with me.
Tonight I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.
Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light dissolves into the earth.
I have got your mouth wrong, but still it smiles.
I hold you closer, miles away, inventing love, until the calls of nightjars interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain, into memory.
The stars are filming us for no one.
Tonight's #midnightpoem is by Carol Ann Duffy.
Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019.