Poem

Sein und Zeit

by Judith Bishop •

July 2021, no. 433

Poem

Sein und Zeit

by Judith Bishop •

July 2021, no. 433

We can walk into a room not knowing.
It doesn’t happen every time.

A white room can be painted to be pure.
I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

But it doesn’t have to be.
We can walk into a room

not knowing whether,
or when, or even that.

That
can be the hardest room.

Only you will know.
First there is the walking.

The floor, a chair or two.
The posters

of visions
of someone else’s visit

to a room. Take a chair.

Only then the talk begins,
like a reckoning of beads,

like the body measures sweat,
words wrong

as a rainbow that has paled
to a shadow of itself.

There is always an end.
We can stand and walk again.

We can leave the room in silence,
carrying its moment

in and out of days.

Judith Bishop

By this contributor

Judith Bishop lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She is Director of Linguistic Services at a multinational language technology company. Her poems have won many awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011), an American Academy of Poets University prize (2004) and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2002-2004). Her translations from French poets (Philippe Jaccottet, Gérard Macé) have appeared in Australian and international journals. Her first book, Event (Salt, 2007), won the FAW Anne Elder award and was shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the ASAL Mary Gilmore Prize. Her most recent collection is Interval (UQP, 2018).