Sunday, 4 March 2012

The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere by Kristin Dimitrova



The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere

We all know each other, more or less.
                 We listen to the reading author
                 with attention.

No one knows the three
                 grey old women
                 in the audience.

When we hear the long awaited ‘help yourself, please’
                 the three grey ladies
                 hurry to the buffet.

We turn our heads away from them.
                 Their rotten smell reminds us
                 of our exit-fee.

They advance without noticing us.
                 Beggars regard the others not as people
                 but as territory.

The three have no place among us.

                 We talk of literature,
                 we will not fill our stomachs with the cheese rolls
                 and we step back squeamishly
                 from the reeking gash into a world
                 that gapes at our cheese rolls,
                 and has neither read, nor heard of literature.

We search for meaning. We came here
                 to treat people to books;
                 part of the meaning came –

to claim our cheese rolls.


Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 16.

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