We are incredibly privileged that local poet Olga Dermott-Bond has written some poetry based on artworks from the Artists at the Sheep Dip.
Olga is originally from Northern Ireland. A former Warwick Poet Laureate, she has had poetry and flash fiction published in a wide range of magazines including Rattle Magazine, Magma, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Strix and Paper Swans. She was one of the winners of the 2018 BBC Proms Poetry competition and is a commissioned artist for Coventry City of Culture 2021. Olga is a member of the West Midland’s development group Room 204. In July, she will be recording a sequence of poems for BBC Radio 4’s podcast Bedtime stories for the end of the World. She lives in Warwickshire, is a teacher and has two daughters.
Twitter: @olgadermott |
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
This morning the studio is quiet, with light resting untroubled, like cream at the top of a milk bottle. She begins, coaxes paint to a vibrant blue, is reminded of the colour of her granddaughter’s eyes mingling of days and years in one brushstroke. Yes. This is just right. The colour of Mary’s cloak or bluebells’ weeping beauty in Old Nun’s wood. The canvas grows with minutes, months. She borrows a fragment of his words that unfurl in the corner like tea leaves, the right strength. Her hands are busy now; these hands that held so many babies when they were firstborn, bodies slight as raindrops, lungs the size of teaspoons, each first cry a drowning moment of joy. She decides to try something new with old cups, saucers from the kitchen, sacred halos of everyday, brimful with warmth. She taps her brush in water, a cumulus cloud blooms and travels around the glass, but the day brightens; eleven o’clock sun stretches itself, making the ceiling quiver and shiver like a shallow river’s moving babble. She can hear the wood of the old piano creak, her brush singing now in a major key. Another idea: green scattered as snatches of folksong, yellow wet like daffodils, soft as egg yolk. She hums a lyric the colour of freshly baked bread. She leans back, studies her morning’s work, hears the lambs’ unframed call from across the lane – Yes. Today is already a bright island of something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. For Dee, June 2019 |
Sixth form assembly in the hall
Some lean against the stage in borrowed topshop jackets, a rushed PowerPoint just finished that will not last long enough. Behind them, the back wall hides decades of school plays Polly Garter, Haroun, Ashgirl, Bloody Macbeth, the ghost of Ms Kane on her step ladder. Windows whisper and whine a rattling nudge against cracked putty that has heard it all before they are mirrors of cloud, so crows fly into their trick, a crash of blue skies, feather and broken necks – Beneath these carriages of light 1950s gym equipment seems ridiculous: students slump on plastic chairs, phones throbbing in their pockets, so very far from plimsolls and latin and star jumps. I watch their narrow shoulders, straightened hair, eyebrows like One Act plays, while my list of jobs struggles in my arms like a crying baby. The paint of the day is not dried yet but they think there is always tomorrow and tomorrow – time a hurried envelope they will leave stuffed in the bottom of their schoolbags, not realising their glass is already half full. For Jo Ricketts, June 2019 |
re-imaginng the Do-Do.
“How humanity first killed the dodo, then lost it as well” From Article by Colin Barras, BBC Earth each feather is a feat of engineering, i sift my hands through her fine flour, hear the prayer of her call, that do-do cry, sleek bone structure, ancient legs like scrolls of parchment paper filled with a language that no-one knows how to read. i shelter her from that first hungry sailor, push the barrel down before the first gunshot breaks the green glass of her Madagascan sea and sky. i lift her carefully, tender as trust, drown history’s echoless well. For Alix Almond, June 2019 |
Hagoshii
The Navajo people have a word for bringing a conversation to a close. Hagoshii. It was the women, the gatherers, who first made pots; mothers who believed they had already passed through three worlds, trusting the wet clay of this glittering one with their wet fingers, feeling the weight of something hollow and useful taking new form. I wish we had shared this word, wish that I hadn’t interpreted your silence, delays and polite replies as a vessel to drink from. I wish I had known you had buried me like a thirsty fragment, because I was still carrying you sacred as air and fire and light, making sculptures of what I thought we could be with my clumsy hands. I handle our last meeting like a fired relic, searching for symbols. I wish I had learnt the shape of acceptance, of what cannot change through time. Hagoshii. It is finished. For Iris Eisenhart, June 2019 |
What I mean when I say the pen is mightier than the sword
I mean I’m holding it next to your throat,
its blade inked and ready. Don’t move.
The next word will hurt, could even be fatal.
I mean I want you to feel the gentle pressure
of my thumb and two fingers, searching for
the pulse jump of yesterday, today, this minute,
again and again and again. I mean it took me
a while to be able to hold you like this, back arched
against the wall, head stretched far, quick breathing panic
over what words will spill out over our shoes,
knowing we won’t be able to clean up the mess.
I mean that I want you to learn the names of its children,
the beauty of such a tiny silent thing that is birdsong and
earthspin and rain and first light and sleep and
dancing – can you feel it yet? Yes: its silvered edge
against the frail skin of mistakes is sharper, softer, mightier
than any sword. I mean look now, how it glints with tears,
how I pull it so effortlessly from the stone of my broken heart.
for David Shepherdson, June 2019
I mean I’m holding it next to your throat,
its blade inked and ready. Don’t move.
The next word will hurt, could even be fatal.
I mean I want you to feel the gentle pressure
of my thumb and two fingers, searching for
the pulse jump of yesterday, today, this minute,
again and again and again. I mean it took me
a while to be able to hold you like this, back arched
against the wall, head stretched far, quick breathing panic
over what words will spill out over our shoes,
knowing we won’t be able to clean up the mess.
I mean that I want you to learn the names of its children,
the beauty of such a tiny silent thing that is birdsong and
earthspin and rain and first light and sleep and
dancing – can you feel it yet? Yes: its silvered edge
against the frail skin of mistakes is sharper, softer, mightier
than any sword. I mean look now, how it glints with tears,
how I pull it so effortlessly from the stone of my broken heart.
for David Shepherdson, June 2019