Night Writing
Preview of ‘New and Collected Poems for Children’ to be published by Faber in Autumn 2009
by Carol Ann Duffy
Night Writing
Only a neat margin of moonlight
there at the curtain’s edge.
The room like a dark page.
I lie in bed.Silence is ink.
The sound of my breath dips in
and out. So I begin
night writing. The stars type themselves
far out in space.Who would guess,
to look at my sleeping face,
the rhymes and tall tales I invent?
Here be dragons; children lost
in the wood; three wishes; the wicked
and the good.Read my lips.
The small hours are poems.
Dawn is a rubber.
