Poem of the week: The Man in the Wind by Anne Stevenson

"The man in the wind who keeps us awake tonight is not the black monk of the wind cowering in corners and crevices, or the white face under the streetlight stricken with the guilt of his noise, or the great slapping hand of the wind beating and beating the rainy alleyways while the torturer proceeds with the interrogation and the prisoner's risen voice bleeds over cymbals and timpani."

"His dream of the wind is the anger that tunes his mind and wears his skin. His cry is not what the wind says but the fear he lives in. Nor is the wind less human for being wilder, or being, as now, a roar, a continuous roar as of waves where there is no shore, none, and no inland or headland to hinder the pour of dark water over still more water."

"From her 1982 collection, Minute by Glass Minute, The Man in the Wind sets out to find a figure who is not entirely beyond myth, but without the power of myth to exert means of understanding and control. Perhaps the poet was challenging herself initially to find the visible equivalent of the pareidolic Man in the Moon, often associated by English tradition with Sabbath-breakers and drunks."

The man in the wind keeps people awake and refuses familiar or comic personifications. He is neither monk, drunk, nor merely a slapping hand; his dream of wind is anger that shapes mind and skin. His cry reveals fear rather than the wind's speech, and the wind can be wilder yet remain human. The wind becomes a continuous, shoreless roar like endless waves that drown the island and erase skyline, ports, towers, cranes, and horizons. The figure operates as an implacable, politically resonant force that threatens civilized achievements and values without meaning or being.

Read at www.theguardian.com