Unseen poetry

Read the two unseen poems. Compare how the poets present ordinary moments that reveal deeper feelings. Bus Stop, February (written for this paper) Six of us under the shelter's broken roof, rain coming sideways like an argument. A man in a suit reads his phone like scripture. A girl with green hair sings under her breath. Nobody speaks. We have agreed, it seems, that silence is the rent we pay for space. The timetable lies. The road shines black. A pigeon limps along the kerb, unbothered. Then the bus comes, lit up like a lantern, and we file on, polite, eyes down, six strangers carried home together who will not remember each other's faces. Inheritance (written for this paper) They gave me my grandfather's watch in a box that smelled of his drawer: peppermints, pipe smoke, Sunday. It had stopped at ten past four. I wound it once and it ticked — a small, insistent heart — then slowed, and caught, and stuttered, and would not start. I keep it on my desk. It tells the wrong time twice a day and the right one never: the hour he put it down, and went away.