International Times

Holy Bread

Montage: ©Claire Palmer, published in International Times, 26th July 2017

The hunger was the woman with a friendly, foreign name-tag.

That busy Saturday.

 

A miracle healer, as pale as milk, passed through the city –

a reminder that we all had our role to play in the war.

 

For a moment, his voice stopped the curious shoppingbagscrowd-

echo between tall cement buildings.

 

A sudden rain followed, baptised my sleeping bag,

in the queue at the Lower Street Food Bank.

 

The history sliced a nearby road in tiny squares of holy bread.

 

– published in International Times, available here

Movement

Photograph ©John Stadnicki 2017

 

If we want the world to move forward,

we must hold hands. Documenting the pain and the joy,

on the same page,

with water, with fire, with ashes

not with ink.

 

Freedom means nothing when the healthy and the sick

eat at separate tables.

Even the trees sit together. They know that life is actually simple.

But once people renounced their entitlement,

it will take more than a revolution

to reclaim such a right.

 

For too long we took the wrong turn.

 

What kind of world is this if

the madman tells us that

we should be ashamed of ourselves?

©Maria Stadnicka, 2017

 

Published today in International Times with illustration produced by Nick Victor.

‘Plastic’ politics. In ‘International Times’

http://internationaltimes.it/plastic-2/

Illustration by Nick Victor copyright Published in International Times

The local MP came to visit today.
He played with his tie, in the half-empty boiling hot classroom.
Nobody offered him water.
He looked outside at the summery fog and
chewed his nails for an hour or so.
I tried to think of a question.
But all of them were already answered.
He paused and smiled at the camera.
I had a name badge around my neck.
He had nothing.
I sat on a tree-legged small plastic chair.
He sat on a piece of cake.

 

International Times and ‘Imperfect’…pre-election dossier, 19th May 2017

The box arrived. The first books now being sent to the British Library. And, in the middle of it, a new poem published this morning in ‘International Times’ – the newspaper of resistance.

‘A Day at the Office’ – pre-election dossier.

http://internationaltimes.it/a-day-at-the-office/

 

Video

A City Preview – London on Thursdays

Poetry reading: Maria Stadnicka reading the poem City from the collection Imperfect published by Yew Tree Press, 2017. Poem published in International Times, January 2017.

Music: Katie McCue

Video footage: World War One Archive