Metronome

Listening to Vladimir Miller sing in

his bass huge as Lake Baikal the song

by Basner about the metronome

on the radio throughout the long

siege of Leningrad, it starts to seem

to me that metronomes tend to lean

to a pattern of two beats then some

small silence rather than a drum

of continuous ticking, even the one

copied with such deathly tones

in the song itself. Binary metre belongs

to life’s basic history, alone

reassuring continuity: the poem

or the electronic language on

the internetted brain, the same

tune remains although only one

and a city of ghosts can listen.

The pulse against austerity ticks home

through the blood at the heart of reason.

Jennifer Maiden