I designed a pyramid so tough that a star

that only glows every one hundred years falls

into the center giving divine perfect light

I am bad

I sat on the throne

drinking nectar with allah

I got hot and sent an ice age to europe

to cool my thirst

My oldest daughter is nefertiti

the tears from my birth pains

created the nile

I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned

out the sahara desert

with a packet of goat’s meat

and a change of clothes

I crossed it in two hours

I am a gazelle so swift

so swift you can’t catch me

For a birthday present when he was three

I gave my son hannibal an elephant

He gave me rome for mother’s day

My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and

I stood proudly at the helm

as we sailed on a soft summer day

I turned myself into myself and was

jesus

men intone my loving name

All praises All praises

I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard

My bowels deliver uranium

the filings from my fingernails are

semi-precious jewels

On a trip north

I caught a cold and blew

My nose giving oil to the arab world

I am so hip even my errors are correct

I sailed west to reach east and had to round off

the earth as I went

The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid

across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended

except by my permission

I mean . . . I . . . can fly

like a bird in the sky . . .

Nikki Giovanni

‘Silence and a space of sleep’: Travels towards Tranquillity

These verses celebrate or yearn for quiet times: in one, a hot Venetian afternoon; in another, the sun rising slowly over a southern sea. Each of the poets dreams of rest and relaxation and their words are a shortcut to that feeling for the reader, too, as we imagine gliding away across a quiet loch or sinking gratefully beneath the crust of a mountain.

It feels right, somehow, to close this volume with peaceful poems. Before we locked down, we lived our lives at a pace that would have seemed alarmingly frenetic to any previous generation, with snatched moments of tranquillity being precious and few. It remains to be seen whether we can carry any new, quiet pleasures from this strange time back into the reopened world when it comes. Life, even when we’re witnessing it mediated by screens in our own homes, can be loud. As well as a magic carpet, poetry can be an antidote. Reach for it whenever you need to.

from Verses Written in the Chiosk of the British Palace at Pera

Yet not these prospects, all profusely gay –

The gilded navy that adorns the sea,

The rising city in confusion fair,