— Sheenagh Pugh

When he was eight and book-mad, they took him
for the first time to a high building
full of books, furnished floor to ceiling
with shelves of songs, stories, answers, dreams,

and they said, “choose,” and he burst out crying,
because he knew that even in a lifetime
he’d never get to read all of them.
He can smile about it now. It’s something

you get used to. What were once destinations
—Samarkand, Shanghai, Saqqara—
have become the places he never saw,
a slight ache in the imagination.

But tonight he watched a programme about Venus,
where sun never pierces the dense cloud
but glows behind it, turning it to gold,
and tonight the ache is worse, the sense of loss

and waste and unread books, and his life
that seems to him worth nothing if he must die
and never see the beaten-gold sky
of Venus, bearing down like pure grief.