Poem

Sein und Zeit

by Judith Bishop •

July 2021, no. 433

Poem

Sein und Zeit

by Judith Bishop •

July 2021, no. 433

We can walk into a room not knowing.
It doesn’t happen every time.

A white room can be painted to be pure.
I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

But it doesn’t have to be.
We can walk into a room

not knowing whether,
or when, or even that.

That
can be the hardest room.

Only you will know.
First there is the walking.

The floor, a chair or two.
The posters

of visions
of someone else’s visit

to a room. Take a chair.

Only then the talk begins,
like a reckoning of beads,

like the body measures sweat,
words wrong

as a rainbow that has paled
to a shadow of itself.

There is always an end.
We can stand and walk again.

We can leave the room in silence,
carrying its moment

in and out of days.

Judith Bishop

By this contributor

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.