Aspiring

A deeply personal sonnet.

Thank you for your patience during my slight drought in uploading.

I also wanted to personally thank those of you who have subscribed since my last post - over 20 people, which is quite a flattering shock. I’d like to offer you a warm welcome to the community; your presence is noted and appreciated.

I haven’t finished anything new this week, but it feels like a good opportunity to drag something out of ‘the archive’.

I wrote this sonnet in October 2023. I submitted it anonymously to competitions, but didn’t get much feedback. I think it is because this poem is heavily informed by its context, and in a blind judgement that is fairly worthless.

The primary context is that, in my late teens and early twenties, I was at university training to become a speech therapist. It was a career I was utterly devoted to. I felt called to it as a vocation. However, a combination of failures - on my own part as well as on the part of others - led me elsewhere.

I am much happier and more fulfilled in my current life than I ever would have been as a speech therapist, and it is only with a few years’ reflection I can see this was an enormous blessing in disguise.

However, I still occasionally mourn the life I would have had in this field, as is human nature.

~

‘Aspiring’

The taxi driver asks my profession,

and I segment my dream in swallowed breath -

hospitals, schools - sounding the impression

I possess queenship o’er the shibboleth;

and thus, anointed, armed with phones and lungs,

globe in left hand, bulletin in the right,

I fish out prophets who speak unheard tongues,

and cast aside the dawnless silenced night.

In truth, I am a child within a cloak,

prejudiced beggar of powers-that-be,

grasping phrases in my fingers like smoke

blown out by changing winds upon the sea:

Staring at, as Westminster Abbey sings,

the floor tiles between Lionel Logue and King.