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Jo Shapcott has been a Writers Fellow at the British Library, has been winner of the 1999 Forward Poetry Prize and the only poet to be twice winner of the National Poetry Competition, She stands out with an imaginative challenge among contemporary poets .Her work has been described as, 'Poems which have a way of turning physics into the physical'.
One day as they exchanged Then they knew The inscriptions what were yesterday became today urgent proof The jars glinted under their labels: Now the pair were of one mind. At dawn, rows of bare glass Using their white coats
the technicians
touched souls
everyday noises
above the pipette.
that the state of molecules
was not humdrum.
on the specimen jars
which lined the room in racks
took fire in their minds:
mere hieroglyphs
from the periodic table
that even here -
laboratory life -
writing is mystical.
it had taken fifteen years
to collect and collate them.
Quietly, methodically
they removed the labels
from each of the thousands
of jars. It took all night.
winked at their exhausted coupling
against the fume cupboard.
as a disguise
they took their places at the bench
and waited for the morning shift.
Copyright: Jo Shapcott
