Will Harris

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Late

It began with the radio
my dad got me so I could
sleep without hearing
arguments and a good job it
did cancelling out other
noise, limiting thought to
chat I didn’t get, to celebrity
quizzes and late night talk
which kept me with and on
the other side of meaning,
able to curb pain with speech
that when replayed by day
became a counter-urge, a curb
upon the youthful burning
I couldn’t mimic, couldn’t
speak about, until returning
to the sleep of argument, the
argument of sleep, the point
before meaning, beyond
the hope of meaning being
contained, I fell for it again, I –
don’t we speak now don’t we
speak and when we do it feels
like no world is burning

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WILL HARRIS’s debut poetry book RENDANG (2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second book of poems, Brother Poem, is published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US.