Leisure

“Are there still beautiful things?”

Picked up by a community reader who sets the poem's closing question against Davies's Leisure, quoting "we have no time to stand and stare" and "no time to see, in broad daylight, / Streams full of stars, like skies at night". Davies writes as an adult complaining that the capacity for looking has been taken by work. seven asks the question from the other side of the same loss - from inside the memory of a child who had nothing but time to look, wondering whether what she saw is still out there. Both poems treat attention as the faculty that goes first, and both decline to answer the question they raise.