DAILY POEM FOR MONDAY MARCH 24

In this reflection, dated March 1977, Norman MacCaig ponders means of communication, real and imaginary, abstract and physical. The piece comes from the splendid posthumous volume of his poems, edited by his son Ewen and published by Polygon.

REQUEST

What I'd like for my birthday

is a box of telepathy,

a bottle of clairvoyance

and a gift of tongues.

Then I wouldn't need

to sit hunched up in my memory

staring at a screen of images

and listening to a voice

I can't converse with -

and anything I'd say

would need no translation.

- Everything would shrink

to the biggest thing of all,

the immediacy of meaning -

but with one language still to use,

the language of touch, the speechless

vocabulary of hands.