But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly.
Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves - in colour, with their eyelids shut. Craig Raine A poem I like because of its way of startling us into new ways of looking at things - which is something I feel is very basic to poetry. But I think that Raine is participating in a very ancient poetic ancient tradition.