I push my fist against theirs, my soft arms are clasped,

I’m embraced like a man, my back slapped,

and my heart all the time getting faster.

The beatboxer nods his respect.

And I’m feeling bigger than

all of those buildings.

I wait for my turn again,

everything burning.

Kae Tempest

Coal

I

Is the total black, being spoken

From the earth’s inside.

There are many kinds of open.

How a diamond comes into a knot of flame

How a sound comes into a word, coloured

By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open

Like a diamond on glass windows

Singing out within the crash of passing sun

Then there are words like stapled wagers

In a perforated book – buy and sign and tear apart –

And come whatever wills all chances

The stub remains

An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.

Some words live in my throat

Breeding like adders. Others know sun

Seeking like gypsies over my tongue

To explode through my lips

Like young sparrows bursting from shell.

Some words

Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open –

As a diamond comes into a knot of flame

I am black because I come from the earth’s inside

Take my word for jewel in your open light.

Audre Lorde

Wings

(for Miss)

Under her wings I live and grow and against

and with the feathers soft and

strong that open over

the heads of all who

reach up guiding

up

and

out

until the wings

flutter away and we

who are not in need grow

wings for ourselves and open

them up to those without wings

Ellie Steel

from Washing Day

At intervals my mother’s voice was heard,

Urging dispatch: briskly the work went on,

All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,

To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait.

Then would I sit me down, and ponder much

Why washings were. Sometimes through hollow bowl

Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

The floating bubbles; little dreaming then

To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball

Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach

The sports of children and the toils of men.

Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,

And verse is one of them – this most of all.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

‘My wild hair backward blown’ – Taking Flight

A poem can lift us up. These poets sweep us skywards, to feel the magnificent power of a wind that can ‘tear at the pillars of the world’ or gently ruffle a sick child’s nursery curtains. With Anna Hempstead Branch, we straddle a broomstick to ride the wind – ‘wild, dangerous and holy’ – with her fierce coven.

Vanessa Kisuule reminds us that flight of all kinds is real-world magic, and Beatrice Gibbs lets us limp home with the boys in a scarred but miraculously spared bomber. Poets have always understood that there will always be days when we long, like Colette Bryce’s narrator, to scale a rope that stretches into the sky and vanish, somewhere up there.