Creation Myth
On the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet,
there is the realm of "between".
Martin Buber
In days where you were not, I went as the crazed
but duteous bee goes to its tasks, my words were moths
caught under glass, my thoughts fleet as a spring
shower and you were nowhere, not in all those days
when I as a long-limbed girl started from school
for the witching hour of home, willing the road
on and on and, fear-slowed, dawdled, while the barley field
in my eye's corner – the left eye – shimmied and stilled
at the wind's whim. And again you were not there
later in the many hard-shadowed bedrooms
of almost-strangers, there least of all,
though if Buber had it right an inborn Thou
was all the while stretching a white root
into the earth of me: step-daughter, scholar,
sister, lover – all the many ways the world had then
for making sense of me, my life. My story
went on telling me – at any rate I
was being told. Some story! A brief flirtation
with the voguish North, afternoons where I sailed
under a slick umbrella calmly on
to one chore or another until desperation had me
questioning the choices I had made: is it possible
I might have made a go of things after all
with him? Or him? Hadn't I thought so at the time?
And sworn by it? But in the unknowable meanwhile
the sunlit length of garden where we'd meet (how
far from then forethought of) had shrunk to a year
away already – just a year! – its warm brick walls; then it was
weeks only, days... till at last I blinked and stepped
(or – yes – was drawn, for something did stir in me, inborn
or no, at the sight of you; you'll get the moment I mean
from my having told it so often: the breezy shiver
of birch leaves at your shoulder, your voice and the blue
of your jacket, the kindlier blue of your eyes), stepped,
as I've said, without thinking, onto the narrow
ridge of our beginning, and became.
Julia Copus was born in London in 1969, a stone’s throw from the Young Vic theatre, and now lives in Somerset. She has won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and has been shortlisted for both the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. This poem is from her fourth collection, Girlhood (Faber, 2019), which won the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. In 2018, Julia was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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