where the knife is less sharp

I felt it today again, contemplating this almost unreal sunset touch a placid silvery sea I once knew so well.

Walking hand in hand with my daughter along the beach, envisioning our next move, imagining a more liveable, saner place out there.

Where shall we go next? Where shall we, when the world is going mad?

We belong, indeed, in the place we long for.

*       *       *

I live on an island
I work on that island


there is no home
(and that the hardest to admit -
that we're here naked, alone)


the island part of a continent
and that part of the world (obviously)


Fly, float, drift, from place to place,
land to land.


And where is the knife less sharp, sir?


--Lee Harwood, from 'Notes of a Post Office Clerk' in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2004), p. 252.