There is a crack in everything,
that’s how the light shines through.
Or something to that tune.
And I’ve been told that if walls could speak,
they’d tell me what to do.
But Nasreem Mohamedi took a photo in 1972.
The skirting board; a crack in the floor
just before the wall, from which only darkness seeps.
Like the hands of time, a twilight over life, that creeps.
Cohen may be right, but if so his cracks are few.
And maybe it’s not the walls,
but the cracks in the floor
I should be listening to.
Another ekphrastic poem from my uni days taking inspiration from three sources. First and foremost, this photo taken by Nasreem Mohamedi. One of the Untitled photos from 1972.
Second, the song Anthem, by Leonard Cohen, which together with the photo, formed the bulk of the first draft of the poem. And third, the song Drones, by Rise Against, which I lovingly stole the walls could talk line from.
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