Huge congratulations to Rushaa Louise Hamid whose Another Canaan emerged as the voters’ choice for the first IS&T Pick of the Month. Rushaa wins a National Book Tokens £10 gift card and, as the first ‘Pick’, a place on a Lunar Poetry workshop at L’klectik gallery, cafe, performance and (soon to be) poetry bookshop space in Waterloo, London.
Another Canaan
There was a wasteland
and cold tire tracks in the skin of the sand.
I forgot I couldn’t breathe.
In the distance was something
I could crawl to;
flat lands – these were like the lands of my childhood,
a people that weren’t built for inclines
but to trundle on
ever looking past the haze of dust
and abandoning things that could not be carried.
In the rush of feet and vehicles
was a cry that all things must move forward,
amongst the heat and pain,
where the dust had been beaten down into a solid block.
My mother said
“You’ve got fire in your bones and
none in your blood,
and hot bones break,
and hot sand buries broken bones.”
A crib lingers out in the heat
leftover from a broken moment
and I am leftover too
………………….
Voters’ comments included:
I just love the soft colours of her words….
How the first line encapsulates the feeling of the entire poem. It all feels desolate after…
Stirs something within me
so full of images
It was evocative of the desert and brought back some personal memories.
The second verse was touching and something I could relate to.
she does an impression of a Dalek (in reference to Rushaa’s biography notes), and the poem is good