Your Body
by Jay Bernard
Your body is a photograph of
migrants who arrived by boat,
each eye a cabin with a taut
iron bed and silver gromits
looking out to sea.
I am the passenger with a
wide-brimmed hat, perhaps a butcher
from Manchester, or a teacher from Perth,
unmarried, in love with the poets
who write of the British sky’s temper,
how it shifts from foot to foot,
snow has taken root here, bloomed.
The tattoos on your back
are the mermaid at the helm.
These white sheets the sheets
of gold and white sun
at the surface of the sea.
And the fringe of green
along it, the far away mountain
haloed by the mist that comes in
as the island inhales it.
It inches further every breath,
a kind of steady, stagnant rain.
A passenger runs their hand
along the rail. On shore,
the whole town has come to wave goodbye,
to see the young ship set sail.
Then they return to a small house
with a neat, clean veranda
that this poem cannot pass.
From Surge. Reproduced with kind permission of Chatto & Windus.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2019
Surge
Jay Bernard
About Jay Bernard
Jay Bernard (b. 1988, London) is an archivist and filmmaker as well as a poet, and the poems in Surge bring an archivist’s eye and a filmmaker’s technique of pacing to bear on their radical excavation of black British history, drawing lines between the New Cross Fire of 1981 (in which thirteen young black people were killed) and the contemporary legacy of racism and neglect which culminated in the Grenfell disaster. What place in the archive can there be for the lack of accountability and closure, the body and its wounds? Bernard gives a partial answer in ‘Ark’: ‘I file it under fire, corpus, body, house’.
‘In one way, the most important poems [from Surge] are the voices from beyond, because those are the ones that invite the audience in’, writes Bernard. ‘In another way, the more important poems are the ones I read less often. The quiet ones that document commemorations, small moments, people I have known, notebook fragments.’ In 2018, Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award for ‘Surge: Side A’, produced by Speaking Volumes and first performed during the Last Word Festival at the Roundhouse.
