Tom Chivers: Poet in Residence at the 3rd Festival 

Marpha

And all was for an appil

Marpha, in the heat. Apples ripen
on trees in orchards; branches bow
from the sun with their heaviness;
lizards dart from the shade.

Apples are pressed into brandy
baked into pies, left to dry
outside people's homes;
the local shops sell apples
freshly pulped into juice.

Marpha. The faint taste of apples
on sitting down to tea at midday
our boots lying unlaced at the door.

Apples ripen in orchards
on postcards beneath mountains;
a rosebush urges at the window
as if seeing itself for the first time.

I am earthed by the scratching
of plump thorns on glass.

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Ohie Mayenin: My Home Friend to a River

(This poem was Ohie Southwark Poet of the Year 2005 title)

Special, the name Southwark is;
People never heard it
Cannot say the word,
Making it sounds like South Wark.

Southwark or South Wark
By the South of the Thames
Making a place I call home
Friend to a river.

Geoffrey Chaucer School takes me to
Geoffrey Chaucer and Canterbury Tales;
All starts in Southwark,
Centuries ago making me proud of my home.

The witches making cauldron
Boiling "Double double toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble,"
Takes me to The Globe where
Macbeth was created by William Shakespeare
All those years ago;
In Southwark, my home; friend to a river.

Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas Carol
Brought to life by Charles Dickens
Now housed in Charles Dickens Museum;
In Southwark my home, landscaped in green
By Burgess park where jazz music is played
At the weekend by Chumleigh Gardens.

The bridges of Thames keep Southwark
Connected to Northwark;
London Eye looks like people in transparent eggs,
Looking out ready to be hatched.

There are no Elephants and nor there any castles
Yet we call the place Elephant and Castle
In Southwark, my home, friend to a river.

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Saahia Mayenin: Tea at the Knee by the Sea

"It's me," said She
"Who's me?" said He.

"I am the Bee
Called to see
If you can come to tea."

"You and me
Having tea?," said He

"Yes, you and me
Having tea
At a party at the Knee." Said Bee

"At the Knee? That's by the sea?" said He.

"Yes, at the Knee by the sea
On Friday at half past three." Said Bee

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Raaneem Mayenin: Happy as a Nut

The rainbow is in the sky
The rain is falling down
And I am dancing in the rain
Happy as a nut
I am happy as nut.

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Juli Jeana: Poet in Residence at the 3rd Festival

Blue to orange

He saw my tree full season
Bearing fruit of red and green
Against the cerulean sky
Claiming the reality of me
Painted the colours as I would
Dipping his brush in my words
Mixing pigment unknown to him
Placing in complementary hues
Bright fruit against violet
For suddenly he spoke through my eyes
His touch grazing the surface
Extracted the fire from the grain
Until the orange shouted

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Hunter Hunted: Bryan Oliver

I'm hunting through the undergrowth
Running wild
Like a breathless child.
I'm hunting through the undergrowth
Down below
Where the demons go
And blood red claws
Pad
Then pause
Their prey a quiver
Torn to the liver.

I'm hunting through the undergrowth
Hearing angel cries
Taken by surprise
Moonlit howls
Predators growls
Eye sockets sucked
Wings and legs plucked.

I'm hunted through the undergrowth
Running wild
Like a breathless child.
I'm hunted through the undergrowth
In a wake less dream
Down the blood red stream
Hunter hunted through the night
Praying for the dawns new light
Will I make it?

Who can tell

In this bloody godless hell.

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Gracia Iglesias: Sunset over the Savannah with Blue Tree
Translation: Dr Natalia Carbajosa

Light fades
into a dark bird
a collector of hours
that dissolves the waiting
with the thud of
falling fruit.
It is like breathing:
the automatic reflex
of one who is very aware
and knows
how to keep on his feet
despite his burden.

A Poetic Statement

It consisted of wisely arranging the silence
the hours
sometimes as well
the night with its choir of beasts.
It consisted of not fearing starvation
and of learning the cold from broken birds
In order to unwrite ourselves in their feathers.
It consisted of boiling stones of smoke
and drinking the dregs of wait
before sunrise.
It consisted of dying all the deaths
living on tiptoe
correcting heaven and hell.
It consisted, after all,
of being only thirst.

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Able: Tomas Sanchez Santiago

Translation: Dr Natalia Carbajosa

Join the precise valour to initiate the day.
The formulae of sleep, with the first bells,
start burning; and you begin the morning's
hard slopes, shining and restless
like summer honey left upon your shoulders.
Besides you, heavily fall names and numbers.
And the street noise: a cruel commodity
you cannot grasp today.

You follow with the sweet storm
of another name in your lips.
And you start coming
down the evening end, where walls with sun
from certain last streets that leave you sleepless
when looked straight are awaiting you.

Eventually, overcome and simple, you will learn
how to conform to endings: night and its offers.
And when forsaken by modesty sabres
you will believe to have been, at least, able of deserving
the negative rose the day drops at the door
of those who do not yield, and know there is relief
traversing on their own the frozen palaces
of thought, where are no summons,
nor eagerness, nor company: a length only
of terrible visits leaping over the window
to replace the world there, in the cold
stores of the customary, where somebody has lit
- able, unauthorized - the light of strangeness.

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Philip Kane: Rat

When it came into our cellar, the rat
brought fear with it, fear that lingers even
though the rat itself is long dead, poisoned
by the blue pellets that we fed to it.
Like the burglar that came the year before,
we thought we might have glimpsed it once or twice
in the garden, or the gutter, sudden
recognition at the eyes rim. Vermin.
Even so, lifting its stiffened corpse on a
trowel, the long whip of its tail rigid
as a lockpick, I felt - what? - compassion?
Something, perhaps, akin to pity for
this marginal creature, embodiment
of our detritus, bearing our nightmares.

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Helen Long: Water Cycle

vapours of the voice
formation and reflection
understanding parcels crystallise

kaleidoscopic patterns
of milieu emerge
memories and faith its self repeats

sustainable inconstancy
as particles spin partners
receptors to be tickled in the flux

the cloud is non material
and mounting in tactility
It lets steam

Rains soverignless in sight
Sipping a lightning strike

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Kerry-Fleur Schleifer: Out of Interwoven Mess

Shadows mingle
and create an interwoven mess.

'I am your lover.' he said,
caught by the half shadow, half light.

'Will you wax and wane upon
my motionless silhouette?'

My elegant contoured figure
gives enough detail...in a
single flat mood

A black mind
upon a white imagination

Give me your outline
I give you my depth
of surface

An ocean's clarity
quite plainly speaks
with the quivering of
a swelling tongue

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Turquoise: Sarah Wardle

Always a starting to the end,
reaching an island of pause,
never finding more than this
concentration on conscience,

the small difficulties of inner
ceasefire in a city of dreams,
the way days fold into each
other like museum postcards,

or an accordion of beer mats
inside a house of falling cards,
prophesying a future perfect
tense in a clause subordinate

to the main political concerns
of the day-to-day running of
the words behind the meaning
of things, always a sighting to

the last, like the geese arrow
of a fly-past, seen from shore,
always a beginning and never
a returning to the homes and

ones that have gone on before,
always this facing into a storm
on the flat edge of a knowable
world, which is yet unknown.

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Briony Dennis: Poet in Residence at the 3rd Festival

East to Nowhere

I

Take me into the earth.
Smelling the dark soil.
Breathing the dew-damp dark.
Will I have left samsara then?
Every sign representing another
and another and neither representing
a real thing.
Take me back.
There is no going back
or forwards
or standing still,
there is no direction.
Merely correction,
rumbling in these catacombs.
The truth is now. This second. This instant,
the heart of mind, is brought home
in an instant, by the drowning of the telephone,
the destruction of the doorbell,
the demolition of 2.4 and the dinner party.
It's brought home for an instant…
Somewhere along the way to finding something,
to keep us from thinking about that which we should not lose,
whilst we distracted ourselves from that which we were losing.
We forgot to breathe.
To bring it home.
Sit, as the world wheels about you,
Ride the bus, as the universe flounders
and what will we leave?
Empty promises and shiny cars,
we didn't so much as look at the world,
or touch it with a curious finger.
Yet.

II
In the stretched second before dawn.
In the final breath of frost before spring.
In the blast of August during May.
Then it is only the reflection of an instant.
Mirrored in a pool of dust.
It stands alone on an expanse of ice,
towering down a sprawling look over the cold.
Spinning about the pole.
Watching.
Invoking our intercession.
But we have no time for contemplation.
It terrifies. Creeps into your heart.
The stone-still dusk
whisper of the real you.

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Inua Ellams: Poet in Residence at the 3rd Festival

Answering Machine

At the moment
I am merely occupied
eleventeen days from now I may be
the uncorked force of an expired oak leaf
left to decompose between the stalled
and stilled hips of a pink vision
last seen in pursuit of a stage.
I may be the enraged dream, buried
head first in the 2005th beam to hit starlight
I be the chronicles of a kite cut free
foretold to die on five marineian clefts
battered by blue breaths nine millimeters left
of a life, havoc free
as far as the wind knows
I be that vermillion dusted hero
million man marching in Nigerian deserts
under crescent moons with a fist thrown up
smoked on the misty fumes of Bacardi
flavored incenses sticks that burn
only in organized formation
but at the moment,
I am merely occupied.

so leave me a message
after the tone
and I will get back to you.
Juli Jeana: Poet in Residence at the 3rd London Poetry Festival
Blue to orange
He saw my tree full season
Bearing fruit of red and green
Against the cerulean sky
Claiming the reality of me
Painted the colours as I would
Dipping his brush in my words
Mixing pigment unknown to him
Placing in complementary hues
Bright fruit against violet
For suddenly he spoke through my eyes
His touch grazing the surface
Extracted the fire from the grain
Until the orange shouted

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Tricia Peak: Poet in Residence at the 3rd Festival

SKYLIGHT GOD

I see people walking through skylight clouds.
I am a God, superimposing the layers of existence,
Not including myself, the lofty watcher in the sky.
My hair blows and the engines pulse,
That serious heavy ferry thrust
Through Channel water rushings.
Oh, the pushing, pulling, pulsing of the tides:
From nine floors up, the devastating waves
are trivial, almost to be mocked, discarded
not like the same waves from the cockpit
of a twenty-two foot boat, labouring through
confused seas, fighting implacable giants.
From nine floors up France passes in a dream,
The Blanc Nez beach hammered radiant silver,
The sky luminescent gold pulsing copper
I'm blinded by the light, the sky, the sun,
Dazzled by the daylight deity, the delight
of it all, exhilarated by the freedom of air.
A single seagull hangs above the smokestack,
A single seagull, wings motionless
in some ecstatic ferry-fashioned thermal
Oh, that I too could ride the wind
Or could be a dolphin in the bow wave
Or a God, Aeolus, driving the breeze,
Being a voyeur, unseen, unsuspected,
Watching people walking through skylight clouds.
Superimposing the layers of existence.

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Munayem Mayenin: In This Calculative Metropolis

In this calculated and calculative metropolis
I am a pebble-pound that people do not use
I venture in a nurturing charter of things that
Make stronger magic than music or its marks

Printed in water-marks colours and stamped
Here there are chartered places and spaces
Organisations and bodies all having royal
Seals to deliver ways and means to make

Things sing to a singular expressive god
Who cannot understand anything else but
The parchments of take this and have that
So long you can command the call to bell

In this mechanic space where geometry
Joins the cosmopolitan dustbins and sings
Joys of secular gains and grains in matters
Arising into perfectly shaped bankables

In this calm cumulative and professional
Metropolis naïve I am still wondering along
As to where magic still marks its pathways
And music still resides on impossible places

In this absolute solid shape space where things
Are or they are not where black or white one
Must be in order to secure a biological vote
I am a pebble-song being washed by the wind

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Maggie Sullivan: Circularity

Rumour has it
the hamster suspected the goldfish
told the cat
who told the dog
who told the milkman
who put the rumour in a bottle
and handed it to the postman
who delivered it to the butcher, baker
and candlestick maker
who was a right minded citizen
referred the rumour to the Prime Minister
who decided it was an irrefutable rumour
made it known to Mr President
who declared it a fundamental rumour
demanded to know where it started
put everything under surveillance
even Mrs Smith's canary
even the dinosaur bones in the museum
even God. Can you believe
Mr President even had himself put under surveillance
Every animate and inanimate thing
was put under surveillance
except the goldfish
which was long gone
so rumour has it.

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Similarity-Solidarity: Philip Ruthen

In the mirror
I hear people moving
about the house,

their concerns are not as yet my
own;
I could invite them back
and tell them

something in the subcutaneous flesh
is wrong, more than an irritation,
and tell Sergei not to over-write

because the enjoyment fades —
as continually tonnes of coal
there is no knowing if the mirror tells the
truth
and whether the sandman, swivelling,
brought back a call for action;

I hear echoes
of my own voice on the telephone
until this is the concern I will store:

remembering how we are all made
in the same likeness
and simply use different words.

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Fear Not: Laura Bartholomew

Fear not
For I clothe you
In love
And amber

A warm aura
To protect you
From fear and panic

No chains
To throttle you
No demands
To weary you

There is a breast
Here for you
To rest upon

To draw from life's forces
Strong and positive
To sustain you
In times of trouble
So I say

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