Emma George, October 2nd – 15th, 2021
I began my residency with the statement ‘what if my voice had validity.’ Everything I created stemmed from this premise.
I began work on a lyric essay for my PhD in Creative Writing Plymouth.
I explored Sappho, the poet of antiquity whose work only exists in fragments. I created fragments from Sappho and my own life and wrote them on thick paper that I left under rocks in Priests Cove to explore how things can be transformed, become others.
Equinox prayers in the last gasp of summer
Moving through a morning field of dew the crane flies rise
and seem like dandelion clocks, but leggy and winged
they wisp and scatter like seeds, and what if prayers were visible
and the motion of my boots could create something so audacious
as to navigate wind. Prayers revealing how one thing becomes another
just by the act of observing, as the flustering, blinking flower of the ivy
becomes a cluster of red admirals flourishing and swirling in chiffon
ripping like the end of summer. Strewn in the brambles of still blackening
berries, gossamer flung creations with a magician brooding in the centre,
I blow gently with my terrible power and she trembles and scuttles,
with a body that looks like the face of a lion If blessing could be audible,
the bees are swarming behind the hedgerow, our last direct line to God,
we stand in the centre point on this see-saw of a field the sea shrugs ahead
like a pole that is visible and the moonrises in the place where sun rises
and it’s swollen and golden and my words rise and dissolve like crane flies
maybe we too are in the act of becoming, If everything that mattered
was tangible we’d be swamped with blessings, plagued with prayer,
but there’s hope everywhere, like the group of young scientists
with their foot squares, isn’t to categorize and examine,
a form of love, itself a prayer.
in the shifting light.
Emma George 2022