Memory

By Ruth Stone

Profile at The Poetry Foundation

 

Can it be that

memory is useless,

like a torn web

hanging in the wind?

 

Sometimes it billows

out, a full high gauze –

like a canopy.

 

But the air passes

through the rents

and it falls again and flaps

shapeless

like the ghost rag that it is –

 

hanging at the window

of an empty room.

 

 

From the Anthology Being Human edited by Neil Astley