Double-click on any word and see its definition from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
Before reading the poem, try this vocabulary exercise to help you with some words that appear in the text. After reading, try this comprehension activity, then do some writing yourself.
After your addio - breathless, banal, the click
of the telephone, I came out into Corso Vittorio
Emmanuele. Milan's glorious main street:
rows of posh shoe shops, buckles and toecaps
on tip toe behind thick glass; at the end of the
boulevard the cathedral spires like the tails of
old seahorses: rigid, brittle and upside down;
sunlight all round me in a hot, close envelope,
with its smell of coffee and expensive brief cases;
words on the air from the English lesson I had
just been teaching: "Sylvia never arrives late.
Tom loves pop music and small dogs."
This is the present simple for habit. It goes on
and on I was saying. Then down the road
they came: three bright dresses in yellow, pink
and peacock blue, blurring to blobs of floating
colour inside the tears in my eyes. They jangled
the words, advanced unbearably bright towards
me: Sylvia loves pop music. Tom never arrives
late. Small dogs. Small dogs. Never. Loves.
Robert Seatter
With kind permission of the poet, previously published in Poetry as a Foreign Language, edited by Martin Bates, White Adder Press, 1999
Imagine the feelings of one of the people involved in the poem - the person who said "addio", a student of the teacher in the next lesson, or one of the people wearing a bright dress. Can you write a few lines or notes about the speaker in the poem, from the point of view of the speaker?
Send us your words.
top
| 
