Carl Tomlinson
Oxford Stanza Two
Two themes I took from the exhibition were the physicality of Harry’s quests for knowledge and the recurrence of lines- lines of communication, lines of data points, lines of battle-in his story
Lines
A line in a letter recalls
the boy seizing eggs from a nest in the garden,
taking flight from the ever unhatched
A line on a lab chart records
the man seizing sense from a nest made of metal,
grasping light from the atoms he hatched
A line on the battlefield crackles.
His atoms take flight and they fall
in a line in a cable, a line in a diary,
a line on a monument wall.
© Carl Tomlinson, October 2015