Patricia Smith Reads “Panopticon” by Diane Hamill Metzger
Patricia Smith reads Diane Hamill Metzger’s “Panopticon,” winner of an honorable mention for poetry in PEN's 2005 Prison Writing Contest, at the 2009 event Breakout: Voices from Inside. Read the poem below.
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Panopticon
So again this vista is eroding.
The buildings dim. The women doze in their
Steel and stone barns, their toil
Having been state approved, the sheets
Bleached harmless and stacked on the tables
By numbers, as the lambent stars emerge.
This is the desolation of
Similitude and recurrence.
And the ones not yet hardened
Sometimes nod in passing, with
Their eyes averted as in deference,
And the tree-bedded crows,
Ebon, latrant, mocking,
"Again!" Always again it begins.
And the years
Seep out of the wind.
Listen to audio of the reading