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INNOVATION

Fathoming new ideas and possibilities

Innovation Title Spread - Katie.jpg

Illustration by Katie Bullimore 

BEAUTY BLOOMING OUT OF STARVED DIRT AND DECAY

NON-FICTION CATEGORY WINNER

Writte by Holly Peters (Third Year English with Publishing)

I hope your spine doesn’t shiver, or quake, or cry,
but know that we’re here.
Your name like water, crystal clear,
still flowing, still slipping through the net.
Beauty blooming out of starved dirt and decay because
the fire still burns, the nightingale still sings.
Just your body: your heart she kept close,
scared to let go of her last part of you.
Water rising, water weeping,
mortality: sought and stalked, attained and achieved –
words in water, words to last – heart aches

 – Line written at the non-Catholic cemetery, Rome 

 

At first, I’m taken aback by how humble it is: a starved gravel path and balding patches of grass, the odd statue or grand monument, but mostly it’s just minimalist headstones. Then I remember who I’m here to see. Their names are etched into the welcome board, with arrows that save us from stalking across every acre, more loved in death than in life.  

 

The only sound is the ground crunching beneath our shoes. I don’t know why I’m holding my breath. We walk under an archway. The air feels clean away from the fumes of Rome’s transport and tourists.  

 

Tomba di John Keats.  

 

A pale stone is dedicated to the young English poet. It’s unnamed. Anonymous. Name writ in water, the inscription reads. His dying wish. It’s a reflection of the poet’s obsession with mortality, and with the fading nature of art. Impermanence. The stone has no dates, so there is no way to know that he was only 25 when he died from tuberculosis. 

 

The ground in front is crowded with green leaves that look like lily pads – it seems fitting – but I can’t help but wonder if they’re weeds. The grass around the outside is wild, untamed, nature blanketing his final resting place.  

 

Alongside the modest headstone sits a bench with a golden plaque quoting Keats’ poetry, and above is an ornate stone with his face in a wreath. The earnest youth captured in his expression looks away from his grave in the direction of the rising sun, towards the future. That’s the way we came from. Sheltering this is a twisted tree, and even at the edge of this crisp winter it’s full of leaves of the richest green.  

 

‘The poetry of earth is never dead,’ Keats wrote. I feel what it means in that moment.  

 

Words crawl like ants through my head as lines of poetry begin to swell together. The present moment is interrupted by inspiration.  

 

Water, still flowing, still crystal clear.  

 

Charlotte fidgets behind me. I don’t know how long I have been standing here, with awe filling my body like blood. To her, John Keats is nothing but a name she may have heard in an English lesson long ago. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, zipping then unzipping her coat, her hands in her pockets and then out of them.  

 

‘What does the “writ in water” mean?’ she asks, hesitant to pierce the shroud of silence we’ve stitched together.  

 

‘Fleeting,’ is all I find myself replying.  

 

She nods like I’ve explained it, but the words slip away. 

 

I hope your spine doesn’t shiver, or quake, or cry.  

 

As we head towards an ostentatious tomb of another, I look back and see a single violet growing just behind the stone, its posture strong against the wind, its head lifted. It’s surviving. Thriving. 

 

Beauty blooming out of dirt and decay. 

 

‘We can go back if you want,’ Charlotte says, but in a way that makes me feel like we can’t. 

We don’t go back. We go in search of the tower where the internet told me Percy Bysshe Shelley was buried. We walk right past it because the tower isn’t much of a tower, but more of a crumbling stack of old bricks with an ivy infested door. The gravestone is a large marble slab flat against the muddied ground etched with Latin. It takes us a while to work out the dates. 

 

Cor Cordium, it says. Heart of hearts.  

 

The small yellow flowers, which this time I’m sure are weeds, look as though they’ve been trodden on. They’re not radiating sunshine any longer, nearly translucent and speckled with dirt.  

 

Your heart she always kept close. 

 

We click the intercom to exit, and a woman in the help centre waves at us. We smile back, waiting for the heavy gate to squeal open. I cast one last look around to the sleeping souls, trying to commit the greenness of it to memory. The stillness.  

 

Once we leave, I feel a weight like grief. I am mourning because although I have never met them, these are people that I know.  

 

Mortality, sought and stalked, attained and achieved. 

 

Google Maps barks directions at us so we can find the subway, and then all illusions of serenity are snatched in the pungent stench of sweating bodies, and the metal scratching against metal as the train rips away.  

 

I sheepishly inform Charlotte over the sound of the accordion player lighting up our carriage that the next destination on our whistlestop Rome tour is the Shelley and Keats House. We’re going to see where they lived to understand where they died.  

 

Words in water, words to last – heart aches. 

Lighthouse fish intergration.jpg

Artwork by Tam Moyo (Third Year Film and Television Production)

THE EXPIRY DATE OF JARS

Written by Ieuan Holt (First Year English and Creative Writing) 

He sits in a chair that’s too big for him. The red leather threatens to engulf him, like a loose coin that strayed too far from the pocket, destined to be lost forever in-between the cushions, important enough to remember its disappearance, but not enough to warrant retrieval. He puffs out his chest whilst the woman, sat opposite him, rummages in a bag that has probably seen better days. The rustling of loose paper fills the small office, its walls furnished by the books he wishes he had written, and journals which had briefly known his name. The settled dust now only disturbed by the late-night caress of cigarette-stained fingers in their intermittent search for something more.  

 

The triumphant fluttering of pages drags him back from the walls he regrets filling. He flinches at the thud of hours of work landing upon the worn table.   

 

‘Read it,’ she says, as her gentle hand pushes the mountain towards him.  

 

Something inside him tells him not to. He looks. Her words begin to fade into white noise until there is only him and this. This thing of unknown quality. 

  

‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’  

 

He nods, smiling as his student goes to leave, the chair stuttering on the carpet that he never did like. At the door she stops and dashes back, hand once again searching.  

 

‘In case you want to keep in touch,’ she says, handing him a photo of herself with a mobile number on the back.  

 

‘Thank you.’ His voice is at the point of losing composure.  

 

She waves. The door closes. 

 

He empties a jar, clattering old pens onto the table, forcing them to relocate for a photo. Her photo. The youthful smile distorted.  

 

Something within him stirs. 

 

               

                                               

Sleep alludes him as he turns the last page for the hundredth time. Perhaps he will invite her to coffee. To discuss. 

               

           

                                            

He sits in his chair and waits. Wind fills the space where thought might have existed. His breath is ragged, like an instrument in dire need of tuning. His eyes are fixated on the jar brimming with photos. An amalgamation of mouths and eyes encased in glass. A ritual they all had slowly started to follow. He encouraged it. Some of their eyes make his skin crawl, but he acknowledges them in silent thanks. Without them, there is no him. The door rattles under the weight of a fist.  

 

‘Enter please,’ he says, stifling a cough.  

 

A man enters and sits, the chair whines. Small talk leads to the fluttering of loose paper. Dread constricts his veins at the rustle and thud. A photo sits on top. A younger version of the man, halfway up some unknown mountain. There would be a number on the back. He could not remember when the man left or the words which he might have said. Would he need to go in the jar?  

    

 

        

He lies on a floor littered with pages, crumbled and torn, a phone in hand.  He waits for the beep, and the rehearsed lines spill out after. ‘Coffee tomorrow, the usual place.’ 

 

He goes to pour the wine down the sink, the recent newspaper clippings on the fridge ripple in protest. His head mimics the swirling red, nodding in time to the thuds from below.  

    

 

 

He sits in a chair too big for him. The hard plastic plagues his back, and his eyes squint under the glare of the white spotlights, like two suns of immense age on the brink of supernova. He wants to ask if they could be dimmed. An impossible request. He takes a breath, ready for a cosmic annihilation that would never come. At least that would be quicker. His tongue creeps out to lick coffee-stained lips. He likes it here, there’s no need to order, they just know.  

 

A heavy door slams open. Two men, their faces familiar, start to ask him questions. Here begins the dance he will have to perform, their opening statement a hand he has no choice but to take. He knows the steps: ignorance to concern, concern to tears, tears to… Thud.  

 

His thoughts stumble at the sight of the jar. 

  

‘Do you recognise these?’ the man asks, his hand skimming photos over the steel table, like stones upon unsettled waters, their flight short, their destination final.  

 

He feigns ignorance, but he knows what the photos are and why he hid them in the jar. There was something about their vacant eyes that he could not stand. Eyes once full of ambition, now dull with expired potential.  

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