Shakespeare..With Cecily Berry Poem by Wojja Fink

She sat like a travelling minister
not with bible or fiery tongue
without a sermon
to bash the heart’s babbling discontent
but with a quietness, and
a passion seldom seen with words that
shone as though the day was
born from her voice

Upstairs different bells where chiming
the secondary modern mind
listed like a ferry on the ocean of Shakespeare;
it’s got iambic pentameters the tutor said,
the ocean rolled into a swell
a bottomless sea of foam and fury
which way is home from here?
I wondered if he put them there,
or tuned in to something else.
that flows from the silence of listening
how could you put all them
pleasing patterns of pattering pentameter feet
in the right place
without falling over your tongue?

She walked around the room
reading from The Merchant
more attention on her performance than the words
she was speaking
Portia fell on deaf ears, yet coaxed by
Cicely’s soulful voice,
do it again, and again, and again.
trying to unwrap us
from the cocoon of wordliness,
the fast voice slowed somewhat
perhaps upon the realisation
it’s not about me;
as the secondary modern mind sank;
into Cicely’s voice.