Burial

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The body is at home in time and space
and loves things, how they come and go, and such
distances as it might cross or place
between the things it loves, and its own touch.

But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error
like some weird pearl, everything is wrong.
Space is stone, and time a breakneck terror
where you hold to nothing but your own small song.

No wonder you would rather stay asleep
than wake again to your live burial.
But sometimes, shrinking in your tiny keep
you make out through the thousand-mile-thick wall
the faint tapped code of one as trapped as you,
saying: those high white mansions—I dream them too—

—Don Paterson 

Ploughshares, Spring 2011

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wait - what ?

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