A Poem by Antony Dunn

Hum

Imagine that the honour falls to you.
The world decides to put its noise to rest
and things are silenced one by one. The best
of us have worked out what we have to do.

The easy stuff: a billion engines cut,
the long-haul planes committed to the ground
and all the birds and animals put down,
the creaking Rhubarb Triangle dug up.

Keep smiling. We continue, sound by sound,
to stopper the volcanoes, motorways,
to hush the auditory microwaves,
to talk the last few Hum-deniers round.

The Chinese fix the biggie: so the moon
is somehow cantilevered into space
and all the tides relax. Then every race
holds its collective tongue in time, in tune.

And yes, this is at last where you come in:
in all the absoluteness of the hush
go barefoot, naked, step outside – don’t rush –
and drop two ice cubes in a glass of gin

and swirl the great, wild bell of it until
the chiming rings the whole earth, on and on
until the ice has heaved and groaned and gone.
So thank you. Drink the glass down now. Be still.

Antony Dunn has published four collections of poems; Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets), Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets), and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). His fifth, Inbetween Days, is published by Valley Press in October 2026. Winner of the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he edited and introduced Ex Libris, a posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press). Antony is a regular tutor for The Poetry School and has taught many times for the Arvon Foundation. He has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel, and China. He has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York, and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. Antony lives in Leeds. www.antonydunn.org