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Band of Bards

by Kimwei

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This week Kimwei’s Band of Bards, with special guest Jackie Juno, were Billie Bottle, Si Egan, Natalie Harari, Amanda Jones, Sovereign Jones, Kate McCormick and Jen Pill. DEVON-FOLK ORIGINS What do I remember? My childhood? My origins? Let me think… From my thinking I was about three. Tucked away, shy, little thing. Knowing Mum was there, struggling. Her injections - I knew those by the time I was five. I am 5. My favourite shirt is red, with boats on. Blue shorts and bare feet on Lino that doesn’t quite reach the walls. Five brothers in two bedrooms. A tiny garden, a rabbit who escaped, and an outside loo. I am ten, a bootcut child. I ask my mum to take me to the barbers again - hair is not my first love. The porcupine look is what I crave, with a bowtie and joggers - goose pimples as the clippers cut across my skull I am ateenager. I come from a background of roast lamb with mint sauce, sardine sandwiches, lemon meringue pie, of finishing food an hour before communion at eleven o’clock mass. I come from neither poverty or wealth. I love my school uniform and save my other outfit for best. Now that I am older, I carry my origins with me, even in my sleep I catch fragments of my childhood funnelling in and out of me. Our house - where we used to put a mattress on the stairs and slide down it head first, where we could turn the furniture upside down to play whenever we wanted, and in later years it was the place that reset me whenever things went wrong. Maybe it wasn't a house. Maybe it was a mountain. And though it was sold years ago, I can always climb up to it whenever I want. The alarm clock shrills, insistent, and I click it off as tiredness anchors me deep into the pillow, pulling me back into drowsy depths. It is grey, that clock - as grey as I often feel when I’m pulled from dreams that are better than real life. Not necessarily sweeter but somehow more vibrant, and I am free. I turn over and try to return to sleep because I can smell dreams of when I used to play in puddles, looking at the sky reflected. Kicking up piles of leaves, the cold drop of the rain running down my neck, the canopy of lush colour above. How long has it been? - too long, but still I remember twirling a curl of your hair around my finger, then spinning around and around in circles until I felt sick and you caught me like I caught your curl. Soon, do you know what I’m going to do again - I’m going to go back into the woods, find a puddle to look into, and check if the reflection has changed. I wake to a Blackbird singing outside my window. Those notes are dancing in my chest. I take a moment to lie here, arriving into my body, into my day, my life, looking up at the pitched ceiling, and BOOM! I’m in the room, the red red womb room - another day to breathe life in.
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TIM: "I haven't seen you in ages" a chance encounter on a walk around the cemetry didn't recognise you without the trademark boots I supposed the reason is it's Summer now flip-flop time as we hurtle headlong towards the great unlocking but I'm wrong "Holes in the soles" you say It's been a while. KIMWEI: “I haven’t seen you in ages, hello!” you shout, from your rolled down car window as you drive right up to the house, your newly bleached blonde hair blowing in the spring breeze. I’m glad you called out to me because although I’m expecting you, I swear I would never have recognised you. As you lift your sunglasses I see you face more angular than before and think how much you’ve changed in one spin around the sun, but surely I haven’t, have I? “Hello stranger!” I call back, beaming a smile that unlocks my heart, “Park on the left.” You park the car and get out. I can’t wait to show you my new place, but first you walk towards me smiling warmly, your outstretched arms... holding out a lateral flow test for me to take. TIM: Familiar face, unfamiliar expression I haven't seen you in ages and yet, looking in your eyes, it feels like yesterday. Overwhelmed by the sense we've passed this time differently; come out of the cocoon on different sides of the world. You in shades, squinting in your synthetic sunshine whilst I shelter from the Devon drizzle, even as the rays beat down. My grief is your torment - your frozen detachment mine. Soon we will clasp hands, laugh and unlock and whatever flows will flow. KIMWEI: “I haven’t seen you in ages,” David says, pouring me fresh mint tea in the back garden. “Yes, it’s been so long”, his wife Tammy goes on “tell us all! What have you been up to?” My mind goes blank. I have literally no idea, my entire memory of the last year has been stolen, as if they existed all this time and I simply ceased to. What IS my news? One day has been the same as the last, for ever so long. I look at my cup of tea for clues to jog my memory and in the end I say, “oh, I’ve started drinking Earl Grey at home, you know…” Thankfully David chimes in with, “Glad to hear it, my favourite! At least until Tammy started growing the fresh mint in the garden.” He holds up his cup as if to say “cheers” and I’m saved, so “It’s lovely,” I reply, and then I say something that is guaranteed to unlock hours of conversation “Tammy, you must tell me more about your garden,” and she does.
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This is the second collectively written poem by my Band of Bards. The words were created during Tuesday evening's creative writing workshop, co-hosted by Tim King (current Bard of Exeter and long time organiser of Exeter’s poetry open Mic, Taking the Mic, and Exeter’s poetry Slam). Contributors were Sovereign Jones, Clare Morris and Jen Pill. THE LONGEST DAY I always associate summer with... long grass caressed by sunlight, standing tall and proud birds showing me I’m still alive the silence of growth underneath my fingernails a warm embrace. The rough buff of sand, on skin, in sardine sandwiches Walking into the salted sea in jelly shoes, shivering with goosebumps until we plunge under, as though an invisible trap door has given way beneath our feet and the water comes like a hundred hand slap. The summer solstice has just gone by and we celebrated with the lemony fizz and swizzle and giggle of G and Ts, strawberries (heart-shaped like a Valentine), ‘til the sun rolled down the hill to winter. We watched it from the bridge. Behind us was the moon and there was a rainbow for a brief moment. Every possible colour ran through us until we were alive with it, each of us vibrating within our own prism. The longest day ended and the next day began. The Sun came out and reminded me that I am not alone, I remembered how happy people can be – so arbitrary really - everything seeming more bearable when there’s a golden light shining down. The sky can get so blue sometimes that I think I’m inside a glass bauble, that the whole world fell away in the night and I was chosen to be plucked from it and transported to the land of perfect summer, where there is no time for squelching jelly shoes, seaweed around the ankles, or queuing at the fish n chip shop until we get heatstroke. This summer I will definitely fall in love. I’ll walk barefoot on grass in the delicious shade, watch three buzzards circling woods beyond Yonder Meadow and the sky clear, blue, still, drinkable. We’ll have barbecues that send the dog spin, spin, spinning and come sunset we’ll sit on the bridge again, our prism bodies ready for every colour as the sky turns from turmeric yellow to bluebell purple and bell pepper red, before dropping off the edge of this glass bauble earth. Yet winter rolls nearer so slowly we won’t notice the days getting shorter. My promise is that I will hold on to the light as I quietly, secretly, unpick the weave of years that have crept around me, tying me into this shape, this life. Maybe I can subtly touch the knots, loosen them, listening for when the daylight yearns to return. They say “you will hear it in the back of your mind, like the memory of an echo calling far, far away in a voice that seems so familiar and yet so distant, just a hush - an eyelash on the skin”.
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These Beautiful Days: Part 33 of my Immediate Writing Series for Sarah Gosling’s Arts Show, October 8th 2021 (close to National Poetry Day) This is the second collectively written poem by my Band of Bards. The words were created during Tuesday evening's creative writing workshop, co-hosted by Harula Ladd. Contributors were Rebecca Bindon, Sovereign Jones, Harula Ladd, Art Pajor, Jen Pill. TRANSCRIPTION These beautiful days I often find myself just floating on the surface of some giant vessel filled with sand. It is warm but I can hardly feel it. When I look around I can see that everything is like always but I'm somehow drifting anyway in a dream. “I don't know what you want me to tell you”. My mother used to say that a dream is just a dream, so I took her words and carved a very heavy, still statue out of them. It is now in the basement where it belongs, along with the dust. She doesn't think that the things that are hidden at the bottom of the ocean can be discovered. One day I will bring her a beautiful shell of an animal she doesn't believe in. *** These beautiful days when the weather is hot and we feel most like ourselves, I come here to surrender humbly and gracefully. A dream - floating into freedom, in a crazy world I reach for my centre. I am weightless as I move, effortlessly flowing, floating, bobbing, sculling. I roll onto my back to see the sky. I am in my garden. This has been my dream since I was 3 years old - to have a pool with my house, with a big inflatable ring to lie on. *** These beautiful days are slowly slipping through my fingers. As the trees become heavy and the leaves start to fall. Where will my footsteps take me? I am not happy here. I am searching for some other landscape. Right here right now, in real life, I feel such a righteous anger my fists scrunched together, nails crushed into my palms, anger coursing through my veins. What is this madness? I find myself living a life devoid of what nourishes me from within. What beauty does the future hold? As I uncurl from a deep sleep my hands start to speak. Nourishment, connection, courage - Courage! To keep walking and trust I won’t fall, but even if I do there are others to call. *** These beautiful days when the shadows lengthen and the goldenness hangs in the air like I could pan it, bottle it, drink it and glow forever from the inside. Days when we speak softly and you reach out your little finger to graze my arm; the sensation of care. Days when you and I, we jump into the freezing cold river, head rushing into your pupils as they dilate and you gasp and we gabble at each other non-stop. Right here, right now, in real life I feel it all. *** These beautiful days, where clouds and patches of blue dance above me in celebration of the gentle warmth and courgettes race towards marrowhood. Days filled with growth, abundance, gatherings and holidays. These beautiful days we cling to with a kind of desperation after the denial of recent times, occasionally drowning under the weight of 'be happy make the most of it' expectation because there is so much not-beauty fighting its way towards us too. What beauty does the future hold? I don't know but if I see a river do I look for a bridge or stepping stones to help get me to the other side, a place I can see and prepare myself for, choose to go. Or do I dive in, trust the course of the river to know best, and take me there. *** These beautiful days are starting to come to me, where stillness is bliss. At midmorning I sit and think of nothing in particular, and it is the finest quality of nothing I have ever tasted. I sit and savour it with the sweetness of flower honey in my dark black tea. At sunset I walk by the river and speak to nobody as they pass, and it is the gentlest wordlessness I have ever shared with anybody. I hear only the long grass brushing against my boots as I stride through it, letting it bend and give way to my quiet path.

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released May 26, 2021

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Kimwei Exeter, UK

Pre-order Anthems For Change at kimwei.com !

Where is the soundtrack for the climate revolution? I believe it is down to us all to make it. This year I've teamed up with folk musicians Chris Dance, Lisa Rowe & Anita Clarinet to make the songs of tomorrow’s history: music that births change - a lush landscape of vocal harmonies, guitar, strings & woodwind to surround and transform you. ... more

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