Cece's Speakeasy | South West Activists: 'She Hums' by Hannah Temme

Set in a future world where coffee and chocolate are nearly extinct, Cece’s Speakeasy is an immersive poetic experience where storytellers, poets and musicians share new work exploring hope and action during the climate emergency.
Find out more at www.ceces-speakeasy.org
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'She Hums' by Hannah Temme
She hums in me
A god I can taste, touch feel and see
At once a bittersweet melody
And a wordless singular soundless beat
Felt as an pulse through the soles of my feet
Felt as a need to be breathed by the wind
Exhaled as a being beyond mind and skin
To reunite my blood with her river water veins
Float downstream and adopt her name
She hums in me with the guilt of my skin
The murderous crimes committed by kin
For displaced hearts from ancestral bones
Legends of people forced northward to roam,
Repeated in kind with sly lies, disguised loans.
She hums in me with a winter seagull wail
A lonely cry from an empty harbour rail
For drilling and spilling, greed untamed
For the execution we paint as a game
She hums in me, pain lost in translation
Now an informal but foreseen death row calculation
Convenience, luxury, speed and profits
Exchanged for commission of child-sized coffins
Go, remember, return, relearn
From those we have mutilated from their land, branded as backwards, and burned
Those who still know how to translate her song
Only with them does our hope now belong
Make the mountains your temples and shrieks in the surf your worship.
Gasps in awe at the seed of tomato
Majesty is in the mundane of a potato
I dare you to re-sacrilise the fruitfly
See a part of yourself in the summer night sky
She hums in us
The song of a dove
Says to love risks despair
But it’s our birthright to care
So do a little hope she says, make it a verb not a noun
There’s still a good chance we can turn this around
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