00:02When I was a little girl I had a best friend called Sarah and we spent all our
00:08childhood years till about 11 or 12 together and then we both sadly were
00:16sent off to boarding schools and so we didn't see quite so much of each other.
00:21One Sunday morning the housemistress came in and she said that my parents were
00:25waiting to see me in the headmistress's study, which I thought was very strange.
00:29I went to see them and it's this beautiful room with a pink carpet and they
00:34told me that Sarah had been killed the night before. And I can remember just
00:41sitting there with my parents looking at that pink carpet thinking, well thank you
00:47very much for telling me. Shall I go back to my mending? Which I think I did. And about a
00:56month later another friend's mother came over to me and she said darling I'm so
01:01sorry about Sarah. And it was like for the first time maybe a month after I could
01:07actually begin to feel it. But I think you numb at that moment and don't understand, I
01:15just did not understand why she wasn't there. I just couldn't compute.
01:21My name is Joanna Scanlon. I'm an actress and I'm going to read a poem called Now by Robert
01:31Browning. Out of your whole life give but a moment. All of your life that has gone before,
01:38all to come after it, so you ignore, so you may perfect the present, condense in a rapture of rage
01:48for
01:48perfection's endowment. Thought and feeling and soul and sense merged in a moment which
01:54gives me, at last, you around me for once, you beneath me, above me, me, sure that despite
02:03of time future, time pass, this tick of our lifetimes, one moment, you love me. How long such
02:13suspension may linger? Sweet. The moment eternal. Just that, and no more. When ecstasy's utmost,
02:25we clutch at the core. While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet.
02:38So it feels to me that that poem expresses in about a moment in time when love and sexual love
02:46is
02:48encapsulated. And I love the way he says, in that moment of romantic kind of ecstasy, you're, you think
02:55you're, you're all about the body, but you're actually trying to get to the core of the person
02:59right inside them. I think that's beautifully expressed. And I feel so sad that Sarah didn't
03:06get to have the full joys of life. What Celebration Day potentially offers is a sort of paradoxical
03:17mourning, but in a vocal and expressive and actual way. We call it loss, but it doesn't disappear.
03:24And the way in which we carry around us all the people who've died, that sense of them living
03:32alongside us has one day in the year when you can share that. And everybody has it. So, I mean,
03:39it's a lot to be shared. It's interesting that people turn to poetry at moments when they cannot
03:46find the words themselves. Their feelings just can't fit their lexicon in their heads. And poets do the
03:55job for us. And thank God they do.
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