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They are shadows dancing round the baton,
one, two, three words, well-tongued.
I have kept them under my tongue, unsure,
but the time comes.
The time is here. The first one falls –
The first is a song, the spiced wine
we never drank, the voices in glacial air
melting the ice with hot breath.
It stays on, a bird, after birth,
a water-bell for its own exit
and the entrance of – something new.
The second is short, swift as a tree,
small as a breeze and strong like a bee.
The third is Duffy.
It is warm bread and rough hands
that finger the flint-words like a lover.
It is mumbled through the cracks in the air
where the meanings slip and seep together,
and your product is not what you put in.
It is brown gold hens in the back garden.
Do you know what makes me laugh?
Well, it is this:
I do not know her at all.
(Carol Ann Duffy will step down as Britain's Poet Laureate on the 30th of May 2019, following a tenure of ten years.)
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