George Szirtes
Biography
George Szirtes’s Reel (2004) won the T S Eliot Prize for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest is Mapping the Delta. (2016). His memoir, The Photographer at Sixteen, appeared in 2020.
‘The inspiration for poems like the one that follows is probably the later work of W S Graham. I chose Terrible Thing to read because though it was written well before coronavirus started on its way, and it fits the lockdown condition….but in this poem the terrible thing is never named.’
The Poem
Terrible Thing
There being nothing
to say they did not say it.
The world was too big
to fit in the mouth,
too wide, too awkward, too flat
to utter itself.
A great depression
had settled on them, stifling
the desire for words.
The language itself
was wrong, too dependent on
fake definitions.
No definitions,
they agreed. Why define things
in a dead language?
The terrible thing
is the terrible thing, no more,
not worth defining.
There, in the water
lay the broken languages
they had discarded.
There, in the meadow
the ghosts of sheep and cattle
grazing their shadows.