Campaign Trail – Day 21
Saturday was more of a day away from the campaign trail than on it. I’d been asked a long time ago to do a set of poetry at the Turn The Page Artists’ Book Fair, and spent a lot of last week thinking about which poems I would actually perform. I was sharing a stage with the very talented Two Coats Colder folk band, so I was even more nervous than normal. Footfall at 2014’s fair was over 13,000 people over its two days, and first estimates are that this year’s footfall was even larger. Every reason not to fall flat on my face.
In the end, it went really well, I’m glad to say. I made four new friends, listened to some great music, and contributed my 15 minutes to the 2pm performance with no greater problem than a very dry mouth, but had my bottled Stradbroke water to hand.
The theme of the set (music and poetry) was the sea, so I read a sequence of poems from a work in progress called the 366 which chronicles the existence of two beings in the forest near somewhere which could be anywhere on the east coast in Norfolk or Suffolk. I’ll post all the poems I read on this blog at some point soon. I ended my first set with a poem I dedicated to all the women on the planet, prefaced with the hope that they will grab with both hands the equality they should have. I was really dead chuffed when that one had the whole of the Forum in Norwich applauding.
To my surprise, Two Coats Colder asked me to have a cup of tea with them, and then asked me (even more surprisingly) to stay on and contribute to the 4:30pm set they were due to perform. I was humbled and flattered, and obviously couldn’t refuse. Good job I’d brought some more poems with me. And, because I was asked by so many people to do so, I finished with the same poem I’d finished the first set with:
Numbers
You make yourself old before you are,
Hiding behind the invisibility the world
Creates for all women of a certain age.
Time doesn’t move.
We move through static time.
The clothes you wore when we first met.
You could wear now
The smile you wore when we first met,
And I looked up from some book or another,
Full of useless scribbles,
And you looked back, because I was there.
It is not what makes us. These numbers
Are artificial measures of a time
We don’t have.
And I would love every mark
Of the time you have passed through.
You could wear leopard skin legs
And I would worship you
The way I do now, in the cloak of the banal.
Nothing changes inside us,
And time is outside.
I have. I never started.
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