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Two poems from Invocations And Portraits
plus a video link

​          
         
          Salvage                    Roger Philip Dennis
 
 
 
          Our hopes shrink to dark matter.
 
          Once helium-buoyant, full of harvest
          fields sown, roofs raised, ovens fired.
 
          Now too heavy a ballast to ride out storm.
 
          To be jettisoned, to end up on come-what-may
          shores, to disintegrate slowly, one more school
          of beached whale in the tide-line plastics.
 
          But then, freak chance, our boat rides out
          hurricane, maelstrom, doldrum, only
          to founder, scuttled, beneath your cliffs.
 
          Salvaging, you discover in the hold
 
          bodies packed in salt, laid out and composed
          as medieval saints whose papery fingers
          breeze stirred, gesticulate in Byzantine
 
          and bewildering benedictions
          confounding more than they absolve.
​

          Djembi                    Steve Day
 
 
 
          I put the kettle-drum on
          the stove to boil a roll,
          learn to play the biscuit tin
          for bourbons; ‘tis the drummer
          not the drum. My other eyes
          are kept semi-shut for safe keeping
          but I, the self, we are part of the
          nomadic tribe of Nobodi - bought off
          with a pair of bongos because
          our feet tread lightly.
 
          My first djembi came from Lagos.
          I fingered the fur rim and it rang like bells.
          Ibrahim Sangjany traded Nigeria with me,
          held my hands and showed me how to paint
          speech patterns into the scraped skin of a dry
          milk-cow – exchanged at market, processed
          and beaten into leather. Swiftly like migrating
          swallows we danced Essex into Afrika and back
          again, scatting spirit spray of rhythm across
          the continental drift with bloodbeat intuition.
 
          Decades later my drum tradition was finally
          forged in Mozambique, crossing thunderclaps
          with musicians who had all the timing in the world
          except that their own country could not afford any
          time for them. I-and-I wide open, eyeing their ears
          to the well worn road of rusting foreign tanks left  
          like giant can-pans beaten with sharp machetes.
          It was a hard week’s work; djembi’s hit parade, my
          only strong arm, sunburnt inside a plain white shirt.
 
          Back in Bristol came a meeting with a one-handed
          drummer from Rwanda, asked to reconcile with the
          man who had taken her left hand to the fire
          and raped her 82 year old mother.
          Oh djembi, beat a route to all name-changed
          nations, curl my fingers and thumbs on drums
          singing of Eswatini.
 
          
          Dedicated to the memory of Honorine Mugabo

 
 

Steve Day - reading A Spell Of Healing
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO2QOShf7VA 
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