Three Sonnets by Kate Bingham

i)

Me again, waking at dawn into
the same old body, coming back to me now
my senses after half a night away
so out of it it seems my bones moved on

and made their own arrangements, waking through
the usual sorenesses and here again, somehow,
to see another morning pale and splay
around the window, daylight too far gone

to turn from as a billion cells continue.
Life, I’m tired. When will you allow
a proper lie-in? Let me stay
in that deadweight weightless oblivion

I am already starting to forget
as impulse quickens and the nerves reset.

ii)

I went for a walk in a storm, my body sore
from sitting too long at my desk that day,
up through mud and ivy to a lane
between two hill-top farms and on along

the hedgerow’s tidy splintered sycamore
to where a single phone line, blowing sideways
in the almost horizontal rain
above the crossroads, rang against the strong

west wind, a sound I hadn’t heard before,
the line a string the wind had learned to play,
the wind a breath the line — as if in pain —
let out, spilling into just the song

I didn’t know my body had in mind,
a sound it seemed I must have gone to find.

iii)

Your body is my home, and though I know
I love you love has nothing to do with how
I sleep in its low room, where I could sleep
forever, dead to the world or like a baby

breathing curled from knee to elbow blotto,
soft and fat as your warm walls allow,
with all the good of you skin-deep, deep
in my bones like some effect biology

can never describe continuing its slow
night maintenance, no need now
for food or water, just this forward sweep
of oxygenated blood, the heart’s involuntary

contractions, work we sleep together through
that I can’t feel and you don’t know you do.

Kate Bingham is a widely published mid-career poet, part-time pilates teacher and reluctant building manager. If you like these sonnets and want to know more, go to katebingham.com.