{"id":96,"date":"2012-03-06T16:49:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T16:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=96"},"modified":"2020-12-09T16:49:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T16:49:45","slug":"kate-noakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/kate-noakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Kate Noakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Zonnebloem<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly \u2013 Langston Hughes.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Let me tell you how I fill my nostrils with home,<br \/>\nwith the girls at the hairdresser, their teenage primping<br \/>\nand perms, pink curlers, hot tongs,<\/p>\n<p>or the boys<br \/>\nat the barbers stopping by for a smoke and a shave<br \/>\nor short-back-and-sides,<\/p>\n<p>and of the choirs,<br \/>\ncrooners, jazz bands, their music before it browned,<br \/>\nof football teams and days in the park,<\/p>\n<p>the bandstand and churches, gang fights<br \/>\ndown this alley or that, preserved now<br \/>\nin black and white,<\/p>\n<p>and let me tell you<br \/>\nof all the places we went between home and school,<br \/>\nhome and mosque, home and synagogue,<\/p>\n<p>I can point to them on the map,<\/p>\n<p>and of baking<br \/>\nand braais or fires on patches of wasteland,<br \/>\nand of the junk and rubbish,<\/p>\n<p>dust and old tyres, the whole wonderful<br \/>\nmess of it, of our teachers, crane-operators,<br \/>\nmaids, nurses,<\/p>\n<p>stevedores \u2013 fairyland.<br \/>\nYou can see the street names here so we don\u2019t<br \/>\nforget them: shepherd, lesar, clifton,<\/p>\n<p>godfrey, parkins, arundel, hamilton,<br \/>\nwindsor, tennant, cambridge, constitution,<br \/>\njoin me in thanking the man<\/p>\n<p>who saved them<br \/>\nfrom the bay, and let the other signs<br \/>\nremind you I\u2019m not inventing.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018I am every stone in this place of stones\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Now throw open the doors, un-cramp this city<br \/>\nfrom pews and stained glass, let these voices<br \/>\nshout down the street<\/p>\n<p>over yellow grass,<br \/>\nlumps of concrete. I can see bricks stacking up,<br \/>\nwooden stakes forcing their way<\/p>\n<p>into baked earth. There\u2019s the smell of creosote,<br \/>\nemulsion on the breeze.<br \/>\nSunflowers are cracking tarmac.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com%20\">*Kate Noakes<\/a> <\/span>divides her time between Paris and Caversham, Berks. She is a Welsh Academician and her most recent collection is <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The Wall Menders<\/span> (Two Rivers Press).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zonnebloem Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly \u2013 Langston Hughes. Let me tell you how I fill my nostrils with home, with the girls at the hairdresser, their teenage primping and perms, pink curlers, hot tongs, or the boys at the barbers stopping by for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23886,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/23886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}