Stealing a few minutes in the station bookshop on the way home I crouch down by the poetry shelves. I put my hand on the floor to steady myself and feel the rumble of a train below in the deep belly of London.
They don't have the poet I'm looking for, but on my way out I pick up a postcard instead, reading:
All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it... Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being...'
William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets.
At the last minute I panic and think that maybe the postcard wasn't free after all and that poetry, and my hunger for it, will set off the screaming alarms, will brand me a thief.
I keep walking anyway, out into the fast crowds, my head raised, my heart expanding.
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