Poem
Gwyneth Lewis
GLAUCOMA
GLAUCOMA
GLAUCOMA
Glaucoma won’t let my mother knit:fine wool is a problem, her most intricate stitch
no longer viable. Unravelling doesn’t require sight.
Look into her eyeball and you’ll see light
receptors twinkling like stars. Ganglion cells die,
darken the supernovae,
lovely eclipses for others to see
in our intimate, sighted jelly.
On the coast, each village had a different style
of fisherman’s sweater, they say. The tide
reads blackberry stitch like Braille
with dexterous pressure, untangling the wool
of tendons. Tears are a retreating sea
full of dark fish swimming. Knit one, purl three.
© 2007, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
From: Signs and Humours
Publisher: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London
Commissioned for Signs and Humours, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw.
From: Signs and Humours
Publisher: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London
Gwyneth Lewis
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1959)
Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's inaugural National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre, rumoured to be the largest poem in the world.
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Poems of Gwyneth Lewis
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GLAUCOMA
Glaucoma won’t let my mother knit:fine wool is a problem, her most intricate stitch
no longer viable. Unravelling doesn’t require sight.
Look into her eyeball and you’ll see light
receptors twinkling like stars. Ganglion cells die,
darken the supernovae,
lovely eclipses for others to see
in our intimate, sighted jelly.
On the coast, each village had a different style
of fisherman’s sweater, they say. The tide
reads blackberry stitch like Braille
with dexterous pressure, untangling the wool
of tendons. Tears are a retreating sea
full of dark fish swimming. Knit one, purl three.
From: Signs and Humours
Commissioned for Signs and Humours, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw.
GLAUCOMA
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