Copyright: Faber & Faber
A Kill‘s power is in its fifteenth line, in the only spoken text of the poem: “It’s a boy!” It’s a fulcrum and it prises the perception of a brutal, lingering death to show a birth. But it’s no gift. The utterance of words and their reception means division, a thing divided, an individual, “shot through the head with balled brains”. The poem is a cry for a lost state, the formlessness and void deposed by light and language.
The boy is “flogged lame with legs” and “nailed down by his own ribs”, entombed. This is the root of the newborn baby’s scream, so awful it is soon excised from memory.
The void wasn’t empty; a kill needs a victim. Mind was there, perception. “Shot blind with eyes” is to lose the sight which saw “his life stab through him, a dream flash”.
Everything goes black but doesn’t end: the final sentence is left without a full stop. In the inversion of the page, everything fades to white after the last character is set.
Leave a Reply