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This poem is taken from PN Review 37, Volume 10 Number 5, March - April 1984.

Madonna Robert Welch

She never liked the sane for going away.
It was so cold when they came back again.
To recommence those intimate confessionals
went beyond a mind so seamed with pain.

That was how she reasoned in a white
serene uncertainty at noon when long
notes confabulated, stuck, then swept
towards the muted tremor of the lunchtime gong.
...


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