Stephen Sexton

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The Impossible

Beyond the canopy of oaks the path 
we walk most evenings perseveres:
the medieval church holds out in ruins,
squirrels love their perpendicular lives,
a breeze brings news of the river 
on the air 
             and not exactly
the scrape of stonemasons at work 
on the tombstone of our times
but an apprenticeship
of skateboarders chiselling
shivers of concrete from our civic spaces,
softening gently brutal edges, boys
and girls who bail nineteen times out of twenty 
committed to impossible revolutions of the board 
about both axes and fracturing a wrist 
sometimes or an ankle past the walking off 
of it and so lentissimo
paramedics cross the square.
And is it a muster of over-shirts,
a caravan of backpacks following 
in the ambulance’s wake 
                                or each alone  
with gravity and the good new road 
tarmacadamed smooth as time
downhill sooner than home and quick?
That’s politics
however the good news is of the coffee bar 
which not unlike everything is coming soon.

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STEPHEN SEXTON’s first book If All the World and Love Were Young received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the 2020 recipient of the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.