I am a house of verse.
Twenty years of hunger built me up.
I sleep on a rag under an arch
on which two thousand verses are written
in two thousand languages.
In each language I am a daughter
and a sister. In all of them my cells split
and my head hammers when I drink too much wine.
A hundred sorrows sit at my side
and croon like old women then.
I cry out: but ‘the Muses
love deep silence’: and I
am like the child Solomon would split:
two feet, one head, a silence
that severs my belly:
each eave I lay down in silence,
I lay each tile, shingle,
I lay down the lintel in silence.
I am a house of verse
and in hunger I built myself up.