IB English A Lit Poetry Questionbank

The following text is a poem by Priya Nair.

Migration

The swallows left on the same morning as the first frost, as if they had been watching the thermometer and booking passage.

5 I do not anthropomorphise. I know they leave because the insects go and the insects go because the cold comes and the cold comes because the earth is tilted as it is.

10 Still, I stood at the window a long time after the last of them.

There is a marsh seven thousand miles south where they will overwinter without knowing they have left. 15 They carry no concept of departure. They will not miss these fields.

I will not miss these fields either. I am also leaving at the end of the month. I have also made arrangements.

20 I wonder sometimes what it is to travel without loss, to arrive somewhere new and find it simply: the place where you are. To winter without knowing 25 that you are wintering.

The following text is a poem by Ada Merrivale.

What the Drawer Kept

I was seven when the drawer said open me,
the third one down, that stuck and then gave way
to spools of grey thread, buttons like small coins,
a thimble worn to silver at the crown.
I took it. Not for need. For the cool weight
of it, the way it fit my finger like
a helmet made for one soft-headed thought.
All summer it lived inside my sock drawer,
under the folded dark, a stolen moon.
When she asked had I seen it, I said no,
and watched my own voice leave me, smooth and quick,
a fish that would not come back to my hand.
She is gone now. The thimble is not gone.
It sits here on my desk and holds the light
the way a small confession holds a room,
saying nothing, asking to be said.
I have kept it longer than I kept her face.
Some things you steal become the thing that keeps you.
I turn it over. Silver. Cool. Awake.
The drawer is closed. The lie is still ajar.

The following text is a poem by Sofia Reyes.

Two Cities

In the city of my childhood the sky came down close, a grey lid on everything, and my grandmother smelled of bread 5 and the particular cold of her hallway and I thought: this is the world. This was the world.

In the city where I live now the sky is a different colour every morning 10 and no one remembers the week before last and the bread has fifteen ingredients and a name. A brand. Everything here has been named until it means less than it meant.

15 I have learned to love the long light here, the way it makes strangers photogenic, the beautiful abundance of what is offered.

Still, at the back of my throat, the taste of that hallway. 20 Still, in some rooms, the smell of bread that does not have a name.

The following text is a poem by Norah Elamin.

Vespers for a Clay Lamp

Each evening I lift the small clay bowl
and coax the wick up from its bed of oil.
The match complains, then settles to a bead
of amber that leans east, then stands upright.

I did not choose this hour; it chose me,
the way a tide selects a certain stone
and returns to it, and returns to it again.
The flame is not a prayer. It only leans.

Yet I have watched it hollow out the dark
and lay a coin of gold across the sill,
and I have felt the small heat find my wrist
like a thumb pressed once against a pulse.

My mother lit a lamp. Her mother too.
The oil is cheap. The saying of the words
is cheaper still, and costs me everything.
I do not know the name of what I thank.

Some nights the wick drowns early in its dish
and I relight it, patient as a nurse.
Some nights it burns until the window greys
and I wake to a black thread of smoke
still writing something upward, still unread.
I keep the lamp. I do not keep the faith.

The following text is a poem by Dalia Fenwick.

Weights and Measures

Before the light has learned the square
she lifts the shutters, one by one,
and lets the cold rehearse its trade
across the trestles scrubbed to bone.

The scales hang open like two palms
that ask for nothing, hold their doubt;
she tips the brass, she coaxes true
the trembling needle in and out.

Apples banked in careful tiers,
the bruised ones turned to face the wall,
a pyramid of small persuasions
built to look as if it cannot fall.

She counts the float, the cold-eyed coins,
and warms them slowly in her fist
until they carry back her heat,
a currency of what persists.

The first of them arrives to haggle;
she names a price and lets it stand.
The morning weighs her, gram by gram,
and finds the measure of her hand.