The civilised side of Field Trip…..here are just some of the poems shared at this year’s festival….
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“Moving In” by Oli Hazzard
You take me down to the crease in the hills
Where the farm’s boundaries are smothered
By brambles and the dry stream-bed lies
Like a pelt – we follow it quietly, shoeless,
Listening to the waves at Calpe knead into
The beach, and reaching out my hand to
Touch your hair we are suddenly
Aware of the sensation that we are being
Overheard: yet all there is on this side
Of the valley is the fuzz of telephone
Wires overhead and darkness slowly
Encroaching behind the skin-pink clouds –
The orange trees, after all, seem to clutch themselves
Above the safflowers and alfalfas that
Spring from the ground like cocked eyebrows –
So, stepping onwards – stalking, by now –
Convinced that night is simply the folding over
Of fingers, leaned into a steeple – we hunt
For some burrow, some hood of earth
Where the sound of the sea is as unbroken
As it is within a coiled shell and build
A fire whose voice, like chicks-being-
Incessantly-hatched, will make our
Own seem all the more improbable. But
Now, as I sit alone, crumbling dry leaves
In my palm, it seems all I can dream of is
The onset of sleep. Really, I hardly notice
The rising heat of the circling brush fire that
Flays the whole sky of its stars.
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“Our paths do not cross here” by Cousin Matt
It’s brief…
…those moments of time
An encounter written by,
the pen that is held, in the hand of the heart, for a dream that is felt by the wanderer.
Radiating through windshields of the consciousness,
awakening souls to break down walls
put there by, the mind of defence, in the head that is bowed, in an attempt to avoid the eyes of the sociable
What no words from the unfamiliar?
No exchange of thought with the dissimilar?
No fleeting glance from the dismissive stance? Our paths do not cross here
We don’t walk with alternate steps to the beat of urgency,
Our lips do not curve in the direction of our emotion
I have seen you 5 of 7 days in every week this year but,
our paths do not cross here….
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“Out There” by Jamie McKendrick
If space begins at an indefinite zone
where the chance of two gas molecules colliding
is rarer than a green dog or a blue moon
then that’s as near as we’ll get to nothing.
Nostalgia for the Earth and it’s atmosphere
weakens the flesh and bones of cosmonauts
One woke to find his crewmate in a space suit
and asked where he was going. For a walk.
He had to sleep between him and the air-lock.
Another heard a dog bark and a child cry
halfway to the moon. What once had been
where heaven was, is barren beyond imagining,
and never so keenly as from out there can
the lost feel earth’s the only paradise.
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“Is there a bear?” by Jack and Lucy
Is there a bear, over there?
No?
Then I don’t care
field trip 