Death called me,
I did not hear.
He spoke again:
Come near.

I went to look
for pity.
Poor death, I thought,
he loves me.

I guessed right,
he does.
And now I love him too,
just because.

By Andrew Motion

I know I said I would take a break from poetry, but let me explain. One of my favorite Poetry books is call “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy. I was looking for a poem from the book to print. It is a unique collection. She writes as the wives of various historical figures — Midas’s wife, King Kong’s Wife, Darwin’s Wife. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was looking for a poem of hers, but alas, I couldn’t find it. Then I read this in the wiki:

Carol Ann Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999 (after the death of previous Laureate Ted Hughes), but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion. According to the Sunday Times, Downing Street sources stated unofficially that Prime Minister Tony Blair was ‘worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England’. Duffy later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that ‘I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.’ She says she regards Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea of a contest between her and him for the post was entirely invented by the newspapers.

So buy her book. You won’t be sorry.