Hannah Linden (British Working Class Poets)

Hannah Linden

Hannah Linden is from a Northern working class background but lives in Devon, in ramshackle social housing with her two (adult and adult-cusp) children. She is published widely eg in Acumen, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Shearsman, Stand, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar etc. Her most recent awards are 1^st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky will be released 19^th September 2022 with V. Press and she is working towards her first full collection. Twitter: @hannahl1n

Conversations with My Childhood Friend in His Final Days

 

He is pixels   away   from real    his

              light refracted into goodbyes.   Are 

we fishscales   floating    into each other

 

before we settle onto a seabed?   He says

                   eat me now   before   I   sink  behind a grain

of sand   swallow what is luminous

 

before it dulls itself to salt.   We 

                      are time travellers   caught   between

digestion and waste.   There’s a future

 

that needs to be fed.     We’re words   away 

           from emptiness.      Tell me what you 

                    are feeling – how you are managing

 

the drift in current.   We are  huge  oceans

                          of need and miraculous meetings

in the vast spaces   between   shores.

 

Sand shifts   its suck   of goodbye.        

         Loose ground  turns itself     inside out

    again.       Seaspray.         Waves.       Loss.  

 

 

 

(Won 1^st Prize in the Café Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021)

 

 

 

Buckets

 

Love knocking at my door

whilst I looking out of window

at creature

in middle of lawn

digging hole so huge

foundations

of my house 

slide right in. 

 

Something so beautiful about 

evening sky viewed 

from bottom 

of pit 

that 

 

I lie here

counting stars, 

 

watch tails burn out 

on way across sky I see 

 

framed by lip of creature's

achievement. 

 

What a wonderful hole this is

I say as creature 

throws more and more

earth out of top. 

 

Bits of soil fill air

so I start to wonder if creature has 

plan. 

 

Surely with such gusto and single-

mindedness, creature knows what it is

doing. 

 

Must be tunnel I think

surely then must lead somewhere. 

 

Stars are pinpricks against 

flying pieces of disturbance 

 

then clouds hide them 

as rain begins to fall. 

 

I wonder how creature 

will manage such circumstance

 

but as I look round 

can't see him

for dirt. 

 

This pit mine now. 

 

I wonder about

love and doors 

and the sound of knocking

 

but a bucket would be more use. 

 

I wonder how 

make one from mud and tree roots

and memory of what one look like. 

 

Seems to me, here 

with water up to my knees, 

 

Time is what happens when

imagining buckets rather than love.

 

 

(First published in Lighthouse Journal)

 

Slum clearances

 

There were never no back-going

once it gone, it gone and no

point remembering something

no body for, them all been being

something else with their life and

no one knowing what was is now

under and the under is deep, deep

shadow of was is and no

pattern in light motes carrying

time with it, no still there, no

real or wish for to sleep under pillow

of, you been done and mirror face

done plant its roots in shallow plate

sun kiss still and flower petal fall

with same season turn. Just is.

(First published on The Gravity of the Thing)

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Setu, October 2022 :: British Working Class Poets