I think I should be creating more poetry so lets start with this. Following a twitter flurry over a badly named project, Kill The Archivist, I decided I should turn my talents to writing about the archives I work in. To celebrate the inspiring stories and documents held in the collections. This is the first draft of a poem prompted by the idea of minute books being essential in recording the lives of ordinary working men and women. Our history is full of the rich and famous. Studying documents that were written by and about the common man ensures that their struggles, lives, and deaths are not just recounted in history from the perspective of the politicians or big business. This is a poem in first draft but it has hopes of being good one day.
Minutes
Turning the leaves of the past
You find the people
Black dust under the inked skin
This is the frontline now
They won’t stay silent
Witness blistered marchers feet
Wrench blood from the ground
Keening again widows’ songs
Inking the turns of progress
Remembering pasts
The seasons’ leaves whispering
This is our frontline now
We won’t stay silent
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