Second Light Live > > >
Kate Foley’s first (of 4) collection, Soft Engineering, was shortlisted for the Aldburgh Festival prize for best first collection. She is a tutor ( wordsinhere , SLN, freelance), editor (Versal, Amsterdam) and this year’s judge for the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize.
Kate is a tutor for Second Light Network and serves on the committee (see more... link below).
Ga maar lekker slapen, you say.
It’s 4 am. I have been standing on a blue dock.
Ice lights in the water. A ship against the quay
is rumbling in its guts. Steel threads run to the lip
of the gang plank. A freight wagon rolls to the edge,
unstoppable as coals down a shute. I know
it is full of my sins. I make myself
look at its logo, hoping it’s in Cyrillic,
something I can’t read. It’s the turning away
that creates furrows in our bed. When morning
comes and I open one saurian eye, I see
your collar bones arrow together as you bend.
In one hand a brown coffee mug, the other
wafting little pursed lips of fierce-smelling
wake-up coffee steam towards my sleep.
If I said to you I need to be sorry you’d ask
to whom, for what? since you have taught me
finally how to be kind. That’s just how it is,
you would say.
Ga maar lekker slapen.
Publications:
The Silver Rembrandt, Shoestring Press, 2008
Laughter from the Hive, Shoestring Press, 2004
A Year Without Apricots, Blackwater Press, 1999
Soft Engineering, OnlyWomen Press, 1994
web-pages on poetry p f.
e-mail
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
