Photograph of Cathedral with Bicycle

Shisa Poet:

For months, you don't move, nothing happens
and you feel like the cathedral you photographed
in Cologne, brooding by a broad river.

Low barges glide past, carrying machinery
for factories, or coal for steelworks,
but you stay put, unproductive, to gaze
in a water-mirror. It turns out
that you are really that bicycle
in the left-hand corner, stationary
on a passing barge, where you lean
against the skipper's hut, next to his washing.

Soon the barge will veer from the dark Rhein
to its pale Mosel tributary. You will be set
ashore to wheel through vineyards
in a green valley, collect grapes and look
ahead round the next bend, as you leave
people by the roadside covered in your dust.


Today's Word A.W.A.D.