The English Association - over 100 years at the forefront of English

 

Because the night has a thousand eyes
practised insomniacs spying on your soul inside its tent

 

Because your tactics have become the answer rather
than the question and you no longer surprise yourself

 

Because your least intentions can be lip-read,
your most circumspect movements out-manoeuvred

 

Because the blue indistinct shadows cast by the moon
are not the innocent wolves of this forest nor their hunters

 

Because the sound-surround of the mountains
and the echo-chamber of the lake are also your foes

 

Because your men are as jumpy as a duchess with a secret lover,
because tonight the writing might as well be on the wall

 

Because your emperor, Napoleon, required it of you
and your heart stood waiting to be commanded

 

Because tomorrow, but always tomorrow, you will be able
to telegraph, and later, but only later, also cable and radio

 

Because you are proud, with a pride that fidgets you like lice,
because your sweat is beginning to pour, to sour like fear

 

Because you possess a marksman’s instinct for where
the skin of things is thinnest, how to lift the siege of the actual

 

Because your fingertips have managed to remember all that is
forensic, intimate, reptilian, all that is best kept in the dark

 

Because now you are thinking—it comes in a flash, not a flash,
but a thrill, or a chill, a tingle—that you must turn message to flesh,

 

not flesh, but its pins and needles, tattoos, patterns on matter,
meanings in holes in the paper, the texture of text, a feel for the news

 

and for how, through the long night watch, nubs of words will open in silence
like buds, like the seeds of a future when even the blind can read.

Lesley Saunders