Resonance (2) - Queer Spirit
Hi all - I wrote a poem inspired by Queer Spirit festival and thought folks might like to read it. It sprang from a beautiful moment at Queer Spirit Festival where a harpist appeared in the garden [Nicola Anne Beck and I had created there. The rest of the poem grew around this image.
I’ve mishmashed things for poetic effect - the person in the ball gown was the year before, but to me the space has an eternal quality made up of these small moments of magic. The Pirate Troubadour (his name is Theo Dussek) is real - actually everything in this poem is real, even though it feels like a dream, looking back at it from a chilly November day.
Queer Joy is beautiful, made all the more so by how fragile it feels.
Jez Franck
This garden calls to people,
When it’s dark, the lights twinkle
Underneath ancient trees.
For a few days we create
A new world
On borrowed land.
Tents mushrooming up
Around a central fire,
Where old friends and new greet,
Where lovers kiss and songs are sung.
The garden summons a harpist,
A dancer, a writer scribbling furiously.
An impossibly beautiful pair of twinks
Embrace beneath the oak tree,
An old queen looks thoughtful,
Imagining a youth like that one,
Imagining he’d had somewhere like this
To love as he longed to,
Tomorrow he’ll discover that
It was never too late.
Across the grass someone runs in a white ballgown,
To the sound of a pirate troubadour
Singing gently of the sea,
A group break free of a tent and wander to the fire singing in harmony,
We’ve transcended bleak reality,
A vision drawn down to the muddy ground
From the wildest dreams of our forebears.
The deer watch from the field next door,
On the last night they venture in,
Young stags wandering closer to the fire,
Springing back when anyone approaches.
This world is as fleeting as it is beautiful.
On the margins lurk nightmare things and darkness,
The future threatening to engulf all that we’ve built together.
For tonight, the white walls have rainbow lights.
For tonight we are free.
Jez Franck
