MEETING - HAYWARD GALLERY

Though there was sense in how the masonry was shown,
and knowledge of the Romanesque increased,
the exhibition was too well displayed
so everything stayed cold and far away.

But quietly in one dark space
there was a little head,
in stone, no larger than my fist,
and all the concentration of some quiet afternoon
when master mason carved an image of his lad,
was there again.

The boy looked back across eight hundred years
and made me feel I might have known him once.

Martyn Chalk, Hull

"In this poem I like the movement from the general to the particular, from a public to a more homely type of language. In the first verse there is room to walk about at "the exhibition�too well displayed�" In the second verse, "a little head�.no larger than my fist" and we are caught in the writer's time-warp and totally focussed."

C.A.Coiffait