“A people that is no longer making history looks to the past for reasons to feel proud. And as far as novels are concerned, it may be that the amorphous, incoherent nature of society today is resistant to fictional illumination”.

Alexander Chancellor, the Guardian, 10th September 09.

Amorphous (4) Copyright © October 2009 Elizabeth J Oakley

I found bodies of flies lodged
in the window frame in heaps,
a minor mausoleum of dis-
entangled bodies without wings.
And wasps that had hard-banged
twenty times against the pane.
Gritty-eyed, heat-boiled, part-
dead, alone on the windowsill.
Our lives are not part of
history, you and I.