Simply Being | Simple Being

Misty…


Misty

How I love

The darkwave music
Of a sun’s eclipse
You can’t see for cloud

The saxophonist playing ‘Misty’
In the High Street outside Barclays

Accompanied by mating-calls
Sparked off
In a Jaguar alarm

The way you’re always there
Where I’m thinking

Or several beats ahead.

— Ruth Padel

It’s uncanny how I read this poem while in Cairo and yet, felt a strange sense of homeliness with the poetess. Btw, this poem was part of the Poems on the Underground, a series of poetry which appeared in advertising spaces on the tube. Evocative of London as the contributor expressed… no saxophonist, no Jaguar alarm, not even an eclipse… Yet so awfully evocative of solitude and isolation.