Louisa Hooper was born and brought up in London. She graduated from Cambridge in English Literature and gained a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa. Having taught English in Japan and the UK, Louisa now works in publishing in London. She has been writing poetry for a number of years and her work features in the third Poetry School anthology I Am Twenty People! (Enitharmon 2007). She has also had poems published in Tabla, Magma and Citizen 32 and was a winner in the Barnet Open Poetry Competition in 2001. She is an editor of Brittle Star magazine and was a poetry judge for the Koestler competition in 2007.
Quelle: poetry p f

Beggar on the Tube

If you were dying, let’s imagine it—
it costs me almost nothing after all—
in Technicolor, say you’d just been stabbed,
blood wet, red through your shirt, face tight with pain
and with the effort of remaining quite
polite, lest messy in your death throes, you
offend me, jeopardise my sympathy,
would I still lock my eyes inside this book,
see nothing but a pair of ancient scales,
hanging uneven as an unseen hand
adds yet another stone to the left side;
then shocked for o a second maybe more
that I don’t help you, quickly lose myself
in thinking up the words for this first line.

Louisa Hooper
published in Citizen 32, Issue 2, Oct 2004