Sìana Baker is a second year undergraduate English student at King’s College. She enjoys twentieth-century poetry, philosophy, literary theory and modern film.
I have been writing poetry, quite literally, since I learned what it was. I’ve actually been writing stories since before I could write – I used to love the Simpsons, so I would draw pictures accompanied by horizontal lines of broken zig-zags (like in the newspapers in the cartoon) and rehearse ‘reading’ the story for my reception class. My writing has always been everywhere: any English schoolwork was hung on my bedroom wall and on the walls at school and my diary, no matter where it was or at what age, always had poetry in it.
But I am not a prodigy. I wasn’t writing symphonies at seven or solving the fifth postulate, I was born in Lincolnshire trying to deal with my mother. My poetry was never that good and still isn’t where I would like it to be, but I am slowly learning.
Of all the pressures in my life, I never want poetry to be one. I want to be effortlessly good at it: I want to write poetry like I walk to school, like I tell the right person I love them or like I get over a cold; because I want to, because it is good for me and because I would be half the person without it. Pressure does not make me a diamond, it makes me a wreck. Hence, all my poetry is written in one go, in twenty minutes and never edited. I like leaving the trance behind and going about my day, or to bed; I like having something to look back on in a few months when my writing is better and being able to love what is bad and good about it.
I am raw and messy person. I can quite confidently say that it is my favourite thing about myself; I love not caring (if it’s ethical) and the comfort that gives other people to want to be themselves, or in reassuring them that things really don’t matter as much as people might suggest. I am shamelessly ragged and I like my poetry to be the same way, for myself and for the people that might see it on my social media, because I hate the idea that everything in art, and everything in social media, has to be curated as a masterpiece. I am not a masterpiece and neither is my writing and we both love ourselves endlessly for that.
I hope you enjoy!
Epitaph
Half my words half worn away
On an old cave wall
We drew things with our fingers
Like tracing clouds on so-so days
Jagged like the safe path
In an unmarked minefield
With their tablets and text messages
I am God now
And you find yourself ruined
By my absent design
Let my verse give you something
About the poem
This poem is all about permanence, or a lack thereof. I used the act of writing as a way to represent this: the idea that we have been drawing before then, that we went from slate to paper to laptop to phone, but one thing stayed consistent. When we die and after all of our loved ones die, all that’s left of us is what we produced. The idea of an epitaph drives me insane – how could a few words sum up everything I’ve ever learnt my entire life? At the point I am laid to rest, I am no longer an impression on the world but another grave, just as are all the ancient philosophers and great musicians and scientists; We are all impermanent for our lives, permanent in death and ultimately equal. As well as that, people’s attitude towards us changes when we die; people are kinder: ‘I am God now.’ Essentially, I wanted to write a poem about the nuances of legacy, about being both perpetual and limited, amidst expressing my frustrations with how good my writing might or might not be and the pressure I feel to have a good career, which I do not know how to achieve. Will my only piece of permanent influence be my words beyond the grave?
HOME
Beat drums throb my clean gums on the way home
Silt lines my canines and chimes when it chips
Craters in molars like slate slides on leaning cliffs
I am home, home I am now
Shed skin like lean mince falls off the bone
Form creases as grease slowly seeps its way
Steep down the creek leaks my teen grip
I am home, home I am now
Lose hair like bleak news hope does lose
Mistakes made me wake chasing yesterday naked
Hot-headed inbred instead of warm youth
I am Home, Home I am now
About the poem
This poem was written most recently and is stylistically my favourite. I’m taking a linguistics module this semester and it’s really helped me acknowledge more patterns in poetry, so I have been attempting to implement them into my own work. When I wrote this poem, I focussed the most on parallelism and stressing the important words (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much).
I also wrote this while I was visiting my hometown, which is the theme. It’s about a lot of little things— the passage of time, ageing, gradual ‘de-identification’. Every time I go home, I feel a little less connected, a little less happy and a little less like I belong. I have always connected home to a geography rather than a lineage, though after moving to London I realised that ‘home’ is wherever I want to be, and truthfully, I want to be in the city.
My corporeality being represented by nature is a nod to my origins: part of me belongs in Lincolnshire, where I was born – a farming county that stinks of brussels sprouts and manure – and Norfolk, where I spent my adolescence (known for its beautiful coastlines, woodlands and tulip fields). These parts of me feel like they’re being destroyed in the same way urban infrastructure damages our actual environment. As well as that, it signifies just how quickly I feel like I’m ageing sometimes; the ‘childhood’ part of me is being left behind and replaced, my body is growing old rather than growing up and my life becomes more decided day-by-day.
My body is the only thing all my homes have in common, and it has reached its destination. “I am Home, Home I am now.”
Body’s The Lump
Body’s the lump
Cannot get out of itself
Like a clump in the drain
Hates an effortless waste
Body’s the lump
Lubed up in a slump
Smells like small walls
I’m December wet
Body’s the lump
That gave us three months
Calmly chained to the gate
So to strike or await
Body’s the lump
That crumbled in my cup
Felt it cling to my breath
With the dense air
Body’s the lump
Heaped up in a dump
Creation of things
Other ones didn’t want
Body’s the lump
Is what it becomes
A thump in the night
Unwelcome and wrong
Body’s the lump
About this poem
I think this one is sort of self-explanatory. It’s just about feeling a bit uncanny, a bit inhuman. I often feel dissociated from myself and like my corporeality doesn’t align with my spirituality and it’s a theme of a lot of what I write, because it’s the thing I can never figure out. I don’t know why I feel ‘other’ to everyone else, nor do I know how to fix it, which is why there is lots of excess and uncertainty in this poem’s imagery. It’s supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, suffocated and displaced – I would argue that everyone has felt that way in their own body at some point in their lives. It’s about presence, too; the body of metaphysical space, of social occupation. Lots of people feel small, though oftentimes I feel ‘too big.’ Malignant like a cancer, invasive
like damp, resistant like a protest, faulty like a manufacturing error, unsettling like a noise in the dark. All those tiny, silly things that have much bigger impacts than their physicality alone.
By Sìana Baker