A blissful day at the Adelaide zoo interrupted by worrying news and the dread of cancer… The poem is called cloze procedure. (The disambiguation of ‘procedure’ is deliberate.)
Thankfully this was a couple of years ago and the ending was happy – but at the time I tried to capture in poem the frustration of trying to glean information from one side of a conversation. The metaphor that sprang to mind was a child’s reading comprehension exercise. I put the line breaks in the wrong places to add to the sense of ambiguity and dislocation. Not sure if it worked or not. What do you think?
Thanks to Justin Lowe for publishing cloze procedure on his Blue Pepper New Poetry website.
The whole poem is HERE.
