Oh Lawrence that is good. I immediately thought of that awful footage from last night's Channel 4 news on ebola. Did you?
Cheers
Tim
On 12 Nov 2014, at 11:23, Lawrence Upton wrote:
> A little woman lies hunched upon a floor.
>
> Her bones ache, she says. I'm rotting, she says.
>
> She rocks. She rots, inside. Her body's damp
>
> as yester year's fallen bough; it's hollow
>
> and weak, but not with the softness of youth
>
> and health. Her rocking accelerates
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> till the image is blurred; and the figure
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> rising to full height, groaning, some, in arcs
>
> yet widening in which she swings pendulously
>
>
>
> eventually an half-circle is reached.
>
> Axles and con-rods bud; and, over that,
>
> the sound of half-vocalised moaning. Our eyes
>
> move back on a broad angle; and we can see
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> that she is part of a car being driven
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> across pleasant countryside by a man
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> with his foot down on the accelerator.
>
> He has a smile. He turns on loud radio.
>
>
>
> The woman's noise continues and increases;
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> and, above the sound of a broadcast, the man
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> hears a fault of peculiar symptoms.
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> He stops the car and listens; the anguish
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> near silenced, but ,immediately, not quite.
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> He opens the door and the pain sound stops. He goes
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> to the car front. The sun shines. He walks backwards,
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> away from the car.
>
> Focus upon the man,
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> on to the torso, his chest and his head's
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> lower half. He has a respiratory complaint.
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> He wheezes. His eyes glint. The sun reflects
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> from desolate blue sea, each eye a small globe,
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> one of which we are approaching. We cross
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> the coast of Africa and head inland.
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> The course of a large river staggers across.
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> We climb and the river becomes a vein in a wrist.
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> We rise further and the whole of Africa fills
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> half our picture. Beyond the horizon,
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> the wall of a nose rises to occlude the sun.
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>
>
> Soon we've spanned a world, zigzagging, rising,
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> falling to make detail or take broad views.
>
> Crossing the Irish Sea, we lose both height
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> and speed. We descend into moist clouds, with Wales
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> hardly visible, and out over scrappy
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> woods in central England.
>
> People look up,
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> but we don't see; till, on an unlit road,
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> we see the flash of a small torch as a man
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> walks to his car, gets in, and slams its door
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> then starts the engine.
>
> And our feet touch the decaying earth surface
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> of uncut grass and the dank fallen leaves.
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>
>
> She is turned and turned on a complex winch.
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> The noise of human distress is rising up.
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> She's spun quickly in his steaming kitchen.
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> She's swerved to avoid legs of police horses
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> and a truncheon descending. She rushes to grab
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> food from the back of a lorry; flailing her arms,
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> she spins, the propeller of an overhead fan,
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> wailing with hurt in a queue in jostles in a crash
>
> in an argument. She stumbles on steep hills;
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> trees fall and crush the beneath bushes. Her too.
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