TEXT/POETRY

Poetry - a working method

Writing our own texts has had a constructive influence on our work and can be used as part of our process. In both ‘WolfMan/Lycanthropy’ and ‘I Count When She Walks’ we wrote a poem as a starting point from which we unearthed information relating to the theme and turned it into a conceptual model that could be referred to during the process.

I Count When She Walks

Text by Suzie Davies

Part 1
I count when she walks
One and a two
There she is
With salt on her lips
To drain the colour
Maybe
But she steps in time
Three and a four
There she goes
With a dip of her hips
And a flick of the eye
How dare she
Fall in and out of
Five, six, seven
Is she here?
With tiny sips
On salt stained lips
Pale oval traces
Of rolling hips
Eight
I stop counting when she
One

Part 2
She walks again
Her pulse sedate
Sombre in slumber
But frozen by eight
Opal tears on
Pale stained lips
Rolling vaguely
Over seven and six
Make it stop
Failing further
Crawl and dive
Cold regressive smile
On five
Her stem is arched
Her fingers curled
Four reflections
Smeared and blurred
Three, two
One
Gone

WolfMan / Lycanthropy

Text by Suzie Davies

Can´t you hear it?
That wolfs cry 
A lonely howl raised to the moon
Rotating in an ashen makeshift circle
This is not a European delusion
But an honoured transformation
A forcible lunar occurrence
Fully illuminated by the sun

A bite from a rabid disciple
And I become a Hound of God
When the tides are high my fingers curl
My teeth display a dampened pink
A thickened brow preserves my eyes
A bristled tongue rips filth from prey
I am Wer, a man, a beast
A rogue wolf sent to guard the sheep

Odin dons me with a belt of hides
The prowling spirits fill me with fervour
The warrior cry of the Ulfhednar resounds
And wildly in to battle we speed
Heedless fiends beware your foe
Tonight your endeavour to drive the affluence of the earth
Down in to the entombed flames
Will, carcass by carcass, be devoured

And then, Sanity
A twinkling of glaring lucidity
And I am conscious of my crimes
The yelping beast cowers away
From the framework that is me, mankind
Hunted now by a modern animal
A snarling creeping affliction
A predatory psychosis

Who is this quivering delinquent?
The seventh son of the seventh daughter?
A crouching myth, or an anaemic dog?
Whose bloodthirst will parch him again
And in the month of the Wolf Moon
Shape shifted and unleashed
He will justify his sanctity
At Odins palatable feast