The Wait of the World: Act One

The Wait of the World, a poem in three acts 

by Helen Harrop

June 2012

Act One:
The woman waits,
The woman watches,
All glacial grace
As the world passes her by.
All vitriol and volcano
Beneath her micron thin skin.
She travels on
An arrested trajectory
With no peace or progress.
She is a dream dredger
Who is drowning on dry land.
Every day she fills her pockets
With stone-dead desires
And walks to “the bottom
Of a great ocean of air”.

The woman waits,
The woman watches
For permission to proceed.
All chaotic energy and wet steam,
All silent fury and invisible screams.
The vestiges of verbal violence
Still hang heavy overhead
Like storms over Thor’s anvil
Threatening her mind’s meniscus.
Her heart is a prismic prison,
All refracted hope,
All shattered light,
All white heat.
She is held together
Against her will.

The world waits but forgets to watch
And even the orbiting satellites
Avert their gaze
Until one day it slips her mind
To hold her molecules together.
And hairline cracks that race
Across her porcelain mask
Become fractured canyons.
And the whole universe glimpses
The glittering carbon centre
Of this daily doomed star
As she achieves escape velocity
And hurtles into the world’s waiting arms.

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