Over the past weeks, we have received amazing poems and beautiful pictures (photos, paintings, drawings) but we have decided to bring this to an end. Deadline for final entries is Sunday 31 May (send to Sally Wyatt).
In the course of June, Sally, John Parkinson, Paul Stephenson and Eva Durlinger will put together a booklet that will be available in both digital and paper forms.
To keep you inspired, read on for John’s very moving poem.
someone else’s skin
i hear
flapping as eggs are fertilised on roof tops and ledges.
There’s the spooling up of freight flight engines,
clattering fietsers on cobbles and flagstones,
the sigh of a boiler, a finch’s clear chirrup.
Wind and river, the deep thrum of barges
and my breath: a pencil drawn across a page.
i smell spring turned preternatural summer:
dust and light, sub-audible crackle of new-born trees
lambing and lanolin on Sint Pietersberg.
i feel…
uncut, unwashed, unmoored and unbalanced,
chained in a storm of clattering keyboards
in matt aluminium.
i walk down my stairs and out of the door,
checking that the coast is clear.
Is it like this in war time?
Every stranger a danger, every friend a foe?
Hamstering loo paper, pasta, and flour;
slogans on newspapers, shop fronts and bins:
Haw pin!
Haw pin. Don’t let them in.
Oh for the touch of someone else’s skin.
John Parkinson
