c.
H. Sisson
SONNET
Read me or not : I am nobody
For myself as for others, and so true:
If
only it were also so with you
Every accommodation would be easy.
But so it is not , for what we see
Assumes as we look the mask of who ,
Doing convincingly what others do :
So you become yourself without falsity.
Or so it seems . But when delusion stirs
It dreams of a mask, of his or hers ,
And so must you . Where is the truth in that?
And you who read me read nothing or, worse ,
What you make out for yourself, some borrowed features .
Who is what you say but I answer, What?
Fleur Adcock
MY FATHER
When I got up that morning I had no father.
I know that now. I didn't suspect it then .
They drove me through the tangle of Manchester
to the station, and I pointed to a sign :
"Hulme" it said - though all I saw was a rubbled
wasteland , a walled-off dereliction, "Hulme–
that's wpere they lived" I said , "my father's people.
It's npwhere now ." I coughed in the traffic fumes.
Hulme and Medlock . A quarter of a mile
to
now~ere ,
to the names of some nothing streets
