Saturday Morning
- 9 hours ago
- 1 min read
The poem we saw last Friday, Portrait, was a gut-slammer. If poems can be said to exist on a continuum, today's poem, Saturday Morning, is at the opposite end from Portrait.
Hugo Williams
(1942 - )
Saturday Morning
Everyone who made love the night before
was walking around with flashing red lights
on top of their heads - a white-haired old gentlemen,
a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman
who smiled at me from across the street
and gave a little secret shrug,
as if the flashing red light on her head
was a small price to pay for what she knew.
A fun little poem. The pregnant woman's secret shrug and what she knew is the most engaging part.
About Hugo Williams: The son of 1930s film actor Hugh Williams and model and actor Margaret Vyner, poet Hugo Williams was born in Windsor, raised in Sussex, and educated at Eton College. He worked at London Magazine from 1961 to 1970 and has also edited poetry for the New Statesman.
Williams’s poems engage themes of personal memory, childhood, and sexuality with a plainspoken yet wry voice. Hugo Williams won the T. S. Eliot Prize 1999 for his collection Billy's Rain, published by Faber & Faber.