Wordlife: Creative Writing: Simon Corble / Letty Butler
In this month's Wordlife section you'll find a selection of photos and a poem from Simon Corble, taken from his book, White Light, White Peak. The book gently guides the reader through the seasons and sights surrounding the White Peak in Derbyshire. This poem is aptly taken from the Autumn section of his book.
Off The Shelf Festival of Words is just around the corner. Watch out for performances from past Wordlife headliners Vanessa Kisuule and Toria Garbutt, alongside its selection of nationally-known authors, broadcasters and writers.
Joe
READING & WRITING EVENTS
Sheffield Climate Writers Meeting
Tue 24 Sept | 6-8pm | Union St | Free
A new writers' group in Sheffield. There will be readings, writing exercises and discussions on the topic of climate change and our future.
Off The Shelf Festival of Words
5-26 October | Various venues
Off The Shelf is the city's annual celebration of reading and writing. A huge range of writers, authors and poets will be reading at events across the city. Notable headliners include Zadie Smith, Jack Monroe, Jeffrey Boakye and Mark Radcliffe.
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Bare Jarnett
These mornings,
when mist slips down the dale
pulling the quilt and sheet of cloud from
off our sleeping hills
it's good to rise and climb
to some high lane
its stone walls shining
with unearthly dew
awake.
Exposed under a pale blue vault of sky
the ways run free as if in dreaming still
a lucid dream, where all is possible
and all the smothered world below is locked
in foggy nightmare, trouble, joyless doubt;
small hills become as miniature isles
amidst a slowly churning sea of foam.
We click along the rutted, puddled track
delighting in the rose-hips, dripping wet
and come across a ruined farm. We stop.
And, just as in a dream, there's
no choice but explore
An old tin sign for lemonade BARR's
stuck in the earth, a trailer wheel;
a broken sink's two shattered teeth;
the slipping, asbestos slates look
lethal.
We don't go in.
Lean-tos of rusting, corrugated iron
encase the house completely, like some
crustacean on the ocean floor, hiding
from the world. It might not
even be that old.
Whatever secrets lie there undisturbed,
whatever tales of horror or depression
this place has dropped
an anchor on the day
so that, in times to come, we'll say, "No
that was the walk with the ruined farm
on that long lane called
Bare Jarnett."
Simon Corble
Spit & Smoke
Pigs in frocks
spill out of pubs
to swill pints
and bask in the sunshine.
The hogs roast
in pavement pens.
Fatty flesh turns
pink and crisp
into Yorkshire's finest crackling.
They squeal & spit & smoke
teetering tippsily on porcine trotters.
Mid afternoon
as make-up melts on snouts,
the foraging begins.
They trough cheesy chips,
lick ketchup off lipsticked chops,
suck grease from shellaced nails
and flirt
with horny boars,
fresh from the footie
gagging for a hot pork sarnie.
When the sun goes down,
they stumble back
to someone's sty.
Slaughtered.
Letty Butler
