A-Level

It’s what can be remembered, organised,  
thought through at a bare desk in a room
of a hundred others facing the same, as they
squeeze the thought-through thought, through
the pen onto special pages. There might be
inspiration, the heart pushing out blood
into a system that breathes a calm mist
up into the head to reassemble sense out of
the syllabus. An answer about Queen Anne’s
politics, or the Fronde in the reign of Louis
the Thirteenth, revision rewarded. There’s
a kind of growl through a mind of wool
and putty, the sense making itself known
in joined up sentences that lead to the right
conclusion and clinch the answer required.
Or it might not be the right day or the right
year to do this: the blank page answers back.
It’s the last exam, the brain is tired. Whatever
is there to say about Balzac, or Molière, or
least of all Racine? There’s no microscope
to search for clues, no cloud of data to rain
down, and these authors, taught as if they were
dull obstacles, aren’t giving up any reasons
for the faculties to shift into words, to make sense.
Hours pass. You haven’t written a single word
and it all falls into the blank. One day, the future
tipping a trilby and chuckling, might find this
a cruel joke to move past swiftly and find
a better answer. Or then again, it might not.

Peter Daniels


If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Peter Daniels  would like to hear them