Whether from intellectual snobbery or a formally made choice
or wilful ignorance I genuinely cannot remember but,
while my peers strove to be tuned in to the Station of the Stars –
the shifting wave lengths of Luxembourg, and the easy wiles
of Horace Batchelor’s ‘Infra-draws’ and Jimmy Savile’s ‘Guys ‘n Gals’ –
I would listen, on a plastic Bush valve radio in my bedroom,
to the Third Programme and heard, one night, by chance,
in Richard Burtons’s malted baritone, ‘To begin at the beginning:
it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black…’ and I knew then that the making of words –
the dark, solitary skill – would craft mind and heart, soul and brain.
By David Selzer