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
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
