Bristol Ideas (2024)
In 2024, Lyra commissioned 5 Bristol-based poets to write a new poem about the city. This was funded by Bristol Ideas as part of their closing activity. The works were performed at a ‘City of Words’ event to close Lyra Festival 2024.
The five poets commissioned were Sukina Noor, Deborah Harvey, Stephen Lightbown, Lawrence Hoo and Asmaa Jama.
Gull
by Asmaa Jama
most circling sea gulls, chart, chart,chart a path, mostly
backwards, most visit other waters, most can recognize saline
by the scent, most puncture, the riverine, most, notice the mud
banks, most watch the people crawling onto it, searching for
cardboard, most copy, most make a makeshift structure, too,
most are migratory, and i mean without a homing mechanism,
most carry their makeshift homes in their wing span, most
feathered, most salt-hewn, most beautiful gull, most beautiful
gull, mostly, in the air in the archive print, , most salvaged
beauty, mostly, we ( and i mean my parents ) stayed here,
because of you, mostly in that photograph, called boolo boolo,
most names i call you, mean, ocean traverser, most tenured,
most connected to this concrete, most of us smell of ambergris,
most the whales are dead, most of their funerals, you attended
in your masses, back when most of the blubber was burnt,
making the most light, most of those ships, were not a territory
of dreams, not a pirate’s porthole, not here, no, they were
mobile necropolises mostly, you couldn’t account for the loss of
life, mostly you flew away, mostly you circled, devotion to the
city to its bloat like a cadaver, mostly you dove, wanting to
pierce the land, to land, wanting this place to collapse, and so,
you followed the ships up up out westwards, watched as they,
most black, most exchanged, mostly for coins, watched you,
and dreamt, of the sky, its great, cauterwauling, expanse, mostly
that it was blue, that it was endless, that you seemed free, till
they most black most weighed with coins dove too, were blue,
endless, free, too
Psalm for the unnoticed places
by Deborah Harvey
Let’s not celebrate the predictable places
our bridge and harbour, the hipster pubs, those golden
enclaves built with money drenched in blood
This is a psalm for unnoticed places
the unseen edges we stumble on, like the sound of a stream
one night in May when we’re listening for nightingales but
hear the rush of water
when we take a step back it’s no longer there, one step
forward and it’s all but wetting our feet
Yes, let’s tell of the secrets we stumble on
the tributaries that once were torrents, cutting paths
through clay and rock, their old songs drowned out by the
white noise of traffic
that slip through culverts to disused wharves, where the
sun on mud’s an uncovered mosaic, and herons signpost
racing ebb and flood
Let’s celebrate mud
and the muddy paths, leading up through spoil heaps,
gorse and fern, where mining bees tunnel through blighted
soil, a leaning chimney billows clouds of pipistrelles
Let’s wander the ash and clinker paths
puddled back lanes and alleyways, where layers of paint
peel from garden gates, and the dirt between cracked
concrete’s velvet-black
Let’s hallow the limestone and mudstone that earth us
cold clay boneyards that swallow us up, where lives slip
like deer through headstones and gravestones, ivies drag
our stories down beneath leaf litter
Let’s marvel at places that trick us with colour
that clump of dog-violets a dropped chocolate wrapper
and the wall of the Chapel strange as a dream, magicked
from city street to spinney, the dream of a king beneath his
tump, the cleft where kingfishers weave their dreams
through the warp of trees
Let’s remember the gaps we sleepwalked through
in times more frightening than any dream, a field and
wood between houses and factories, a brambled common
where the Severn’s a current of cloud in the sky
and we’d cling to the oak, mast of our ship as it sailed at the
edge of all we knew, as sirens screamed through empty
streets
Let’s honour the spaces that hold us, save us
the bleak and the broken, the wild, the unspoken, here in
our city
Notes:
My poem is written in the traditional ‘call and response’ format of psalms, and features other elements of the form, such as praise, repetition, and parallelism (where one phrase makes a statement, followed by another building on that statement and leading to a conclusion).
Places referred or alluded to include:
the Suspension Bridge; the floating harbour; Georgian Bristol; Wickwar Common, where there are rumours of nightingales; the River Avon and its four urban tributaries: Brislington Brook, the Malago, the Frome and the Trym; the abandoned docks of Pill and Sea Mills, the latter a port since Roman times; Trooper’s Hill in St George; all the back lanes of the city; Arnos Vale cemetery in Brislington, a Site of Nature Conservation Interest; Sheep Wood in Henbury, where the original 800-year-old frontage of the Lord Mayor’s Chapel masquerades as a Victorian folly; Badock’s Wood in Southmead, where there’s a Bronze Age round barrow; Snuff Mills in Stapleton, home to kingfishers; the River Severn viewed from the edgelands adjoining the Airbus site and Brabazon development on the Filton/Brentry border
Homecoming
By Sukina Noor
I was born on the top of St Michael’s Hill
In a hospital that overlooks the city.
Born in the 80s to the backdrop of resistance
And the soundtrack of Roots Reggae
That echoed messages of Black Liberation
And a return to Africa.
A Motherland
That may
Or may not
Remember me.
Bristol girl, born and raised
Hand-crafted on the streets of Easton.
All I knew was this city and its inhabitants
Yet still, I have craved elsewhere
Forever.
Some other land beyond the horizon
Beyond oceans blue
Beyond the salt water
Beyond the bitter taste in my mouth
Before the trauma housed in my stomach
Before the memories that we have chosen to forget.
From African soil to islands in the sun
Surrounded by crystal clear water
Where it’s beauty betrays the darkness
We were forced to swallow.
Places my flesh had not yet met
Soil that my soul knew intimately.
Awakened ancient memories
Carried over centuries
Alive in my bloodstream.
‘I am from here but not of here’
I told myself.
Regularly.
I always yearned for the sun
That didn’t shine here.
The fleeting British summertime
Couldn’t make up for the the warmth
I thought I was missing out on.
I felt that I had been wronged
That I had been dealt a bad hand
That I had been slighted
That this wasn’t my real life.
That I’d wake up and realise
This had all been a strange dream.
I was supposed to be living in distant lands
Like the ones I read about in the books
My mother would gift me every Christmas.
From my living room on Easton Road
I would fly beyond the pages
Beyond the concrete
Beyond the tower blocks
Beyond the police sirens
Into the body of an African girl
Moulded in villages where elders gathered
And imparted wise words to the young
A time when we were one.
I could hear the fire crackling under an African sky
Tasted the roasted cassava and peanuts
Washed down with fresh coconut water
I too was chewing sugarcane on the roadside
And eating fruit fresh from trees
Not eating penny sweets from the corner shop
At the bottom of the road where my grandparents lived.
I was supposed to be raised there.
Not here.
I knew nowhere but here
Yet still I wanted to flee from here
In pursuit of the missing pieces of me
That would make me make sense.
As soon as I could I took to the skies
Heart outstretched across the heavens
Hopeful that each journey
Would bring me closer to me.
I was seeking my reflection
In someone else’s eyes
A long lost daughter
Looking for my tribe
Praying someone would say;
You are one of us
You come from us
Welcome home.
When I was young
We sung biblical songs of exile;
By the Rivers of Babylon
Where we sat down
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion.
I was born longing for a land
I did not know
The more I travelled
The more I felt alone
To them I was from elsewhere
A bit like them
But not quite
A bit more
w
h i
t
e.
The road taught me
That home isn’t always a place
And belonging is more of a state
And God makes no mistakes
And I was born in the right place.
Right here.
In this city.
When my time here is over
And my name is a distant memory
Bristol’s soil may cover my body
And my descendants may come here
To lay flowers at my feet
Maybe they’ll walk these streets
Trying to follow my footsteps
And maybe they’ll find me
Secreted within Bristol’s concrete
Or underneath there Elder Tree
Where Elderflowers bloom beautifully
In the Springtime.
Bristol is a part of me
And me a part of her
What a journey it has been
To come home
To myself
Finally
POLLIE
by Stephen Lightbown
The Guild of Brave Poor Things was established in 1894 by Grace Kimmins as a supportive community for disabled people. The Guild’s motto was Leatus Sorte Mea, meaning Happy in My Lot. Much of the Guild was inspired by the children’s novel The Story of a Short Life by Juliana Horatia Ewing. There were 12 branches in total, including a Bristol branch set up by Ada Vachell. In 1913 Ada Vachell fundraised to build a headquarters for the Bristol branch. When completed, the building, which still stands today, was considered to be the world’s first purpose-built building for disabled people. In researching this poem, I came across a small reference to a girl called Pollie, who was a paraplegic, and who Ada Vachell, described as knowing she must be brave and happy and good, one of an army of soldiers, wounded in Life’s battle. Whilst some of the language used when establishing the Guild seems jarring today, the impact of the Guild and the Bristol headquarters cannot be underestimated. This is a poem for and from Pollie.
I spend too long thinking about buildings.
These improper curiosities. Countries on a map I can’t sail to.
Apples on a tree that never fall.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about one in particular.
One that was built just for me. Bricks, windows, doors.
A crisp, red Cox’s Pippin in the palm of my hand.
It looks like any other that stands
with a sneer on every street. But this one is different.
Doors wider, rooms larger, song sheets for wallpaper,
there are even ramps for my wheelchair.
This apple makes my mouth water from the edges
of an unfamiliar smile.
The world’s first building, purpose built,
for cripples like me. Right here in Bristol.
And it has taken until now, 1913.
I can’t believe I’m worthy of a whole building.
Your faces reflect my own fears.
I’m a burden, a circus act, a thing
to be laughed at by cobbled streets.
I am a soldier of cruel existence.
But there is a great army by my side,
and so much more you choose to ignore.
Mine is the story of a short life.
Twelve months left at best.
Disqualified from being ordinary.
But amongst comrades, in the Guild,
I have been conscripted.
As we stitch our dreams onto cotton handkerchiefs,
in this exclusion zone, we forget the cripples that we are.
Yet a door can only do so much.
Prejudice doesn’t need a key.
What if these embroidered delusions
might instead dream a fertile future?
Not one I will occupy, but a future
nonetheless.
This building holds the sound of laughter.
This laughter is ours. We claim it.
If you can build one building of joy,
why not another?
Then a street, and another.
Until you’ve built us whole villages,
towns, cities, an orchard of
honourably discharged apples.
INNER CITY TALES
by Lawrence Hoo
So many misguided and divided
Down into minor figures
While outsiders snigger
As they watch on tv thinking
To hell with these fools
With nothing to lose
They should of stayed in school
Instead of breaking the rules
But wait
We're not fools
We are the tools
That are used to distract and confuse
People's opinions on the news
Through pure distorted views
Which are pushed through the media
To create hysteria
'Oh my god these people are so evil don't let them near ya’
Is the chat we hear
But let's be clear
How did we get here
With children raised in fear
Locked in communities no one wanted to go near
But now people want to live here
So let the truth be known
Of how we have grown
Deprived of care or concern
From the scared and concerned
Due to society's neglect
People have to fret
As we have learnt to be cold hearted to all but our own
But this is just a reflection of the love we have been shown
You see
In this time of turmoil and change
People have lost belief in the systems that many have relied on since coming of age
But through this uncertainty soul's have risen
Looking to create new opportunities and driven
By the need to succeed
Not driven by greed
But the endless possibilities of planting a seed
In a world of contradictions
With boundless destinations
For the future is not written
Fate is created by the will of the owner of the soul
Who strives and reaches for the goal
Of becoming whole
With one's self
This is life's most precious treasure and it's true wealth
It's a wealth we all can share
We just need to understand to be aware
Of all the people who need us to care
So that we can all live a full life instead of one unable to bare
So lets unravel ourselves
From the controlling spells
Of stories and tales
From heaven to hell
Forever being told this will be our fate
Destined to a hell filled with hate
If we don’t conform to the norm
And behave well
Hell No
Who knows what the future holds
So be bold
Don’t do as you’re told
Take hold
And move towards the new while banking the old
For your life is a story that has yet to be told