Polly Atkin

This site is named Shadow Dispatches, the same phrase that gave the title to my second pamphlet. It comes from the below poem, ‘Somnography’ (a word I kind of made up: literally sleep writing) which talks about messages or emails that definitely exist during the night but disappear somehow before dawn. It was once filed under a line from a scene in the film The Science of Sleep featuring a dream message (‘Your neighbour, a liar’).

I called the pamphlet Shadow Dispatches partly because it seemed a way to talk about a B-side-ish nature of the poems included: lots had been placed in competitions, but few really had public lives or readers. They were out there, but not out there. Putting them together in the pamphlet was a way to try to address this, but the title was a nod to the notion that they, like the dream messages, might not get through.

Today is National Poetry Day, and the theme this year is messages, so this seemed like a good time to throw this poem back out into the ether, and see what sticks.

 

Somnography

 

Early this morning I got your note.

I can’t recall the words or meaning,

 

only the light oblique on the screen

and how it made it feel, certain

 

transmission was real. I could recite

all the messages received in my sleep

 

which days have tried to prove imagined,

and one correspondence aborted mid-sentence

 

which sent itself nevertheless, as though

the content refused erasure, arriving

 

complete through the ether. We dare not believe

these shadow dispatches: corrupted, wishful,

 

impossible to delete. The same way sheets

I never strung to dry at a window

 

still fill the room with sails long after

I’ve moved, and how I’m still reading a letter

 

a man never sent, though I could repeat it

verbatim, clear as the sun through the linen,

 

billowing yellow and sweet as the wedge

that lit your words I can’t remember,

 

or that email which backspaced even as I scrolled

down the face of the dream computer.