Jenni Daiches' published poetry includes Mediterranean (1995), Smoke (2005), and contributions to many Scottish magazines. Her fiction includes Letters from the Great Wall (Luath, 2006). She writes on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder. Her most recent book is Frontier Scots: The Scots Who Won the West (Luath, 2009). She is currently president of Scottish PEN.
New world
I know nothing of the voyage he makes
as he sleeps in the chair that never moves.
Through the window there is no change, the trees,
the pattern of people on the street.
I cannot enter that new world,
that place without memory, that desert –
or is it a jungle of sensation, teeming
with the wild present, thick with layered
shades of sound and colour, beyond
imagining by those who are bound by the past?
I have to leave now, as he journeys
without departure and no time of arrival.
Jenni Daiches
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