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15 Sept 2023

Tim
Kiely

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New Moon

‘And it was never really
the same after that’

After Ron Padgett’s

Love Poem

                   … no blue and yellow morning in which 

                   your stretching spine perfected itself 

                   and their skin was rosy; no night where their hands 


                   were wind and moonlight over your valleys; 

                   no listless work evenings; no changing of the sheets;

                   no sitting apart to decompress 


                   as the flat hummed gently. You were always flame 

                   even on the low-burning days;

                   the fruit you took at their well-known lips 


                   was always sharper. And the recall 

                   of all of this says there is nothing 

                   either ignoble or easy 


                   about the simple attempt to tell it:

                   coming back to the bench in Congo Square 

                   the greens are deeper, the stones sashay


                   in a different rhythm, newly alive 

                   each time it happens. It was never the same

                   after you were asked, and you said ‘yes’.

Behind the poem...

The title of my poem comes from a line in Ron Padgett’s Love Poem; a poem used to such tender, arresting effect in the 2016 Jim Jarmusch film, Paterson. Both the poem and the movie spoke to me about the ways in which ordinary life can be alchemised by poetic language – and that seemed to me the perfect jumping-off point for a poem about a moment when the texture of my own life altered dramatically ... when my fiancée (now wife) proposed to me.

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© 2025 Original Authors

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