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7 Sept 2025
John
White
Full
Moon
The Inexorable
Sadness of Pencils
After Theodore Roethke‘s Dolor
We floated, avatars of the open plan,
by night rehearsing in the snooker dens
each with a cue trained over a pack of Bensons
like an extension of him, holding a heron
doggedness, a way to keep the eye in –
the likes of Brian who, like a Fomorian,
had one arm and leg (from a railway accident),
would idle by the typing pool, blotting the daytime
copiers slewing grey reports, that rumble
to which lovers, artificers, learned to steel
themselves – car bombs that changed glass to chalk
when staff peeled off to the Linen Hall bar ‘for a slake’,
observed the rites of chit chat, red-eyed, winking,
beneath a charcoal sky one waiting who would kill
to be whisked to the new Baths up on the Shankill,
she being ensnared by its wave machine.
Behind the poem...
My poem‘s title comes from the opening line of Theodore Roethke‘s Dolor, which is about office life. Roethke didn’t seem to like it much. But then, having been traumatised at a young age by family deaths, he also struggled with depression. So perhaps his office symbolised for him a wider dolor – one about the world in general. Yet beyond the ‘sadness’ of his pencils, there is dust that’s ‘alive, more dangerous than silica’. Danger sometimes makes us feel alive. I worked in government offices in central Belfast during the worst years of The Troubles. I know tedium. I also know life heightened.