D: I won’t treat you as a deaf person.

J: Well, I won’t treat you as being eighty-seven.

If saying I am deaf can make it so,

and we must not admit you’re eighty-seven,

and you think not I might not hear you go

today when, cold and tired, you leave the garden

suddenly (we’re staking wire against

the rabbits with Jackson, you say “Three’s a crowd”

and slip away, enticed by pipe and stove,

I stay and splice the jagged nets, in the end,

with bleeding fingertips, alone), and love

does not convince us, either, we have good

intentions: deafness then can be my one

defense, your age becomes a toothless weapon.

Deaf, I hear, approve, forgive your laugh,

and you in turn have cut your age in half.

Copyright © 2007 by Josephine Dickinson

Silence Fell is published by Houghton Mifflin at £16.99, offer £15.29 from timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Times Recommends

• If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...
• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Gifts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die