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Devon​-​folk Origins

from Band of Bards by Kimwei

/

lyrics

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.

credits

from Band of Bards, 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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