Commentary

Although I felt as if I ought to, for quite a while I didn’t write anything at all, save for a few roughed-out splinters of lines. If I wanted to make this sound plausibly and artistically dignified I guess I could imply a kind of sub-conscious working-through of everything I’d seen and heard about the stone. Whilst that may be true, it might equally be true that I was simply and rather more prosaically waiting for something to happen. Eventually it did.

These were going to be public poems, and I decided to use rhyme and rhythm, because often rhyme and rhythm can smooth the path between the poem and reader, especially a reader not ‘expecting’ a poem. I left out the punctuation at the end of the lines because, well, that’s the way it is with signposts.
- cj allen