Whisper

A cobwebbed whisper of wind 
wakes and stirs. The breath

of the ancient gods
is upon me – all at once

I am weeping. The air
is thin and lucent

as bees’ wings.
I can almost distinguish

the aerosol swirl
of the disappointed dead – 

drifting like snow against
the sleeping ramparts

of this,
our woebegone world. 

This photograph is one I took of the ‘El Castillo’ pyramid at Chichén Itzá, on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico - one of the so-called Seven New Wonders of the World.

I travelled there in February 2025 for my sixtieth birthday and this poem emerges partly out of my experiences in this and other ancient ‘pre-Columbian’ sites which I visited on that journey.

The air is certainly ‘thin’, in the ordinary sense, in the high places of Teotihuacan for example, but more than once on this journey I was in touch with the uncanny and felt the presence of the dead - thus it seemed to me.

At or in the space immediately after the poem’s ending, I think I am also wondering whether it would really be so bad if we-the-living were to open our borders to migrants from these other worlds, given what grievous destruction we wreak within these fetishised perimeters of ours - while they, the Dead, look on from without - puzzling, no doubt, what it is about learning from experience that so eludes the Quick.

The poem has fourteen lines, but I would very much hesitate to claim it as a sonnet. Still, it intrigues me how often my sense of how much there is to say in what kind of shape and space on the page, often coheres out of the mist into this almost Platonic ideal form laid up in heaven (or down in thirteenth century Sicily, in the case of the ‘little song’). I enjoy the freedom of shorter (sometimes, here, very short) lines and of writing in couplets without needing to attend to the orthodoxies of iambic pentameter - fun though that can sometimes also be!

This poem was published in the anthology ‘Unwhispered Legacy’ which you can access in full here. Massive thanks to Paul Short of The Book Bag for having put together such a lovely volume of poetry. The download is free but the project is fundraising for Médecins Sans Frontières and so please do make a donation if the spirit moves.

“Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is the world’s leading medical humanitarian aid organisation.

We provide emergency assistance to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics and natural or man-made disasters, without discrimination and irrespective of race, religion, gender or political affiliation.

We work in over 70 countries and go to the places where others cannot or choose not to go.”