Poetry: "Vertigo" by Alice Oswald (read by Ruth Wilson) || Climate change poems series
In 2015 actors including James Franco, Ruth Wilson, Gabriel Byrne, Maxine Peake, Jeremy Irons, Kelly Macdonald and Michael Sheen read a series of 20 original poems on the theme of climate change, curated by UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
"Vertigo" by Alice Oswald
May I shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain Starting right now lips open and lidless-cold all-seeing gaze When something not yet anything changes its mind like me And begins to fall In the small hours And the light is still a flying carpet Only a little white between worlds like an eye opening after an operation. No turning back each drop is a snap decision A suicide from the tower-block of heaven. And for the next ten seconds The rain stares at the ground Sees me stirring here As if sculpted in porridge Sees the garden in the green of its mind already drinking And the grass lengthening Stalls … Maybe a thousand feet above me A kind of yellowness or levity Like those tiny alterations that brush the legs of swimmers Lifts the rain a little to the left No more than a flash of free-will Until the clouds close their options and the whole melancholy air surrenders to pure fear and … falls And I who live in the basement one level down from the world with my eyes to the insects with my ears to the roots listening I feel them in my bones these dead straight lines Coming closer and closer to my core This is the sound this is the very floor Where Grief and his Wife are living looking up
Source: Guardian Visuals, 2015
