SURVIVOR
Dedicated to Anita Welsh, one of the survivors of a V2 bombing raid on Palmer Place, Islington, on New Year’s Eve, 1944. Her family were among the 102 people killed during the raid while they were celebrating there in a pub.. Anita was a 2-year-old, fast asleep in the rubble, and rescued by her father’s brother, then a boy scout, who dug her out. Aged 70, she now lives in Canada.
The singing had stopped, the seasonal celebration halted
Between one defiant thundered song-burst and the next,
A chorus of dismemberment descanting bell-stroke amid
The rising rumble of destruction billowing through every street.
Piano keys, like orphaned teeth spilled from a beaten mouth,
Lay scattered among the wasted bleakness of broken things,
Murdered bricks wiped clean of kiln memory,
The rush of smoke and fire hovering like a livid ghost.
Bomb blasts blossomed outward quicker than flowers
Opening, eating all sound with ravening metal lips,
Spreading a stillness so profound, it was as if the world
Was time-locked in an eternal womb of quiet absence.
Cocooned in dreams, I slept, cradled in rubble and blanketed
In loss, yet hearing nothing, incapable of breaking the seal of
Silence that had fallen from December’s sleet-filled skies,
The democracy of dread replete with midnight’s blindness.
In the darkness, beyond the edge of reason, my infant
Sight snagged on a flicker of movement, two hundred hands
Lifted in farewell, the ravaged dead adrift in purgatory’s
Endless maelstrom, their wail of departure leaving no echo.
Later, upon waking, I could smell the animal musk of death, taste
Blood upon my lips, feel my mouth opening wide in the eternal ‘o’
Of fear, before hands dragged me through the remembrance of walls,
The detritus of a splintered family, the ultimate roar of silence.
Researched by Isabel White
ACROSTIC
Silence
Invades
Life,
Engages
Nothing-ness,
Conquers
Eternity.
MIEDZY – NO ORDINARY SILENCE
This is no ordinary silence you are hearing.
This is the silence of aftershock,
When continents, colliding,
Complete their slow rumble of destruction,
And only the smell of corruption remains.
This is the silence of tyranny,
Of domination without mercy,
Of cruelty that swears vengeance.
It is that state of being between states of being,
Miedzy – the condition of between-ness;
A moment that cannot be identified,
Invisible to the naked eye,
(Tho’ not to the naked heart).
In that hypnogogic moment whole universes collapse,
White stars implode, the history of millennia erased
From one breath to the next.
Inhale civilisations flourish
Exhale a million mothers give birth
Inhale civilisation s grow greedy
Become fat and overburdened with bile.
Secrets submerge in the eyes of prisoners
Who have personified the unimaginable.
The camera bears mute witness to torment.
Exhale a million mothers watch their offspring
Stumble blindly in a sunless landscape.
Nobody hears their whispered despair.
Their hearts no longer function.
They are the living dead.
And in between
A thread of sound is born
Connecting silence to silence.
This is the eye of the storm
AGNES MEADOWS is a London-based poet/writer, who has toured nationally and internationally, giving readings, workshops, and residencies all over the world. She was Guest Poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival, Texas, 10 times, twice winning awards for Outstanding Writing. She has written five collections of poetry, the last three published by Flipped Eye/Waterways. She has been an adviser on Poetry for Channel 4 TV, and for the past nine years has run Loose Muse, London’s premiere women’s writers night at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. For more information on her work: E: agnespoet@googlemail.com M: 07789-901-667 www.loose-muse.com