Meeting le Carré

What I felt was a connection with a mind.
Everything else slipping away, unstable;

the June evening pool in the fold of my teaspoon,
the grass outside, uncertain as a mirage

yet his clear voice carry, speaking of Prism
and probity, of how writing, for him,

was always about morality and how
his difficult father turned him as a child,

like Heaney, into ‘an inward émigré’.
In a blur of people, unknown, half-known,

I suddenly saw that the constant journey
into and away from self is the fixed state;

self-doubt and conviction can no more be
separated than Cornwell and le Carré,

the slim hands moving, the passionate,
vulnerable voice telling me who I am.