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by Katrina Naomi
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on an island cos hardly anyone lives there we like to think they’re relatively lawless we won’t be seen or tracked like we are in a city we’ve read Swallows & Amazons we hope for innocence but don’t know what the word means we long to escape something or someone hoping to be where others aren’t we demand quiet but not too much we still want oat milk our urban things without realising this is what they are we ask for tradition the picturesque we want nature but nothing too wild & certainly not all those factories on Sicily we’re unsure whether to expect a welcome but prepare our faces all the same expectation is something we shouldn’t have packed we leave so much behind on returning to our lives on Looe Island I had to bring extra bags to ferry my rubbish home every plastic sachet of soy sauce every tin of beans the washed out bottle of shampoo all of it had to leave the island with me other islands take note
Along the tarred and pigeon-feathered pavement
softened by the unrelenting sun, we count lovers
of dryness. Hollyhocks, nodding to their visitors.
Catmint, Vervain, Spanish daisies, Rosemary.
This year’s hollyhocks are short and strong,
not overstretched, like us. Rainless spring,
followed a parched June. How did they know?
Half last year’s height, still their flowers
make nectar-laden bowers for the heavy bees.
I’ll learn to love dryness in a time of drought.
Teach me to make do with less. To fly my mind,
not my body through the sky. Imagine far
flung places from my un-watered lawn. I’ll no-
mow May. Feed finches, thrushes, blue tits, mice.
And when my hollyhocks are rich with seed
I’ll scatter them in every unkempt hedge. Hope
that one or two will make it to the earth and back
into the air, next year, to lighten passing lives.
Take a washing up bowl, sloppy
with barely bubbled, lukewarm water,
shoulder the back door aside and wobble
splashily into the garden, heading for the roses
with a two-kilo all-in-one chuck of grey water.
Be a helicopter dropping H₂O and hope.
Let the bowlful land with a vegetable crump
in the lemon balm and marjoram fawning at the feet
of Gertrude Jekyll and William Shakespeare.
Never mind the odd lost teaspoon or chunk
of sea cucumber. Your joyful thrift tucks groundwater
into bed, leaves chalk streams tickling with minnows.
Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo Armenian poet. Her award-winning Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter was her publisher’s best seller and inspired a song cycle by Noah Max. Work has featured in journals including PN Review, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Magma and 2024 Poetry Archive Now!
“As someone who believes our best chance of survival is to reconnect with the natural world and to inspire a positive vision of a future still within our reach, I was delighted to encounter ‘Bending the Arc Magazine’ and to submit poems of hope.” ~ Sarah Mnatzaganian
Katrina Naomi’s latest collection, Battery Rocks (Seren, 2024) won the Arthur Welton Award (Society of Authors), the Holyer an Gof Award for Poetry (Cornish Gorsedh), and was recommended in The Guardian. She is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Her new pamphlet, dance as if, is available from Verve.
“I try to find something positive, however small, in a bleak situation.” ~ Katrina Naomi
Yesterday, we met visionary theatremaker Hannah Mulder; today, we’ve brought you a selection of thrutopoetry; tomorrow, we’ll share a piece by the originator of the term ‘thrutopian’ – philosopher and activist Prof. Rupert Read.
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