Poems and fetured artwork by: Jon Whitbread
These poems by Jon Whitbread explore our shared sense of rootlessness and disconnection. Amid shifting perspectives we ask who are we as tourists, strangers, selves, bodies adrift? For Whitbread, the answer is both particular and expansive” I am a vast entity in a hurricane/ I am an atom in a molecular sea.”
Fog
Distracted this morning
By a haze of time, radio, driving, thought.
Now sitting in the farmyard
Contemplating stone,
Sun dissolved in fog.
Cloud particles
Liquid dust, pouring all around me, on me,
A dry deluge
Influenced by micro-gales
That I see but cannot feel.
I am a vast entity in a hurricane
I am an atom in a molecular sea
Cobwebs are inundated
Fields drown in dew
Whole trees engulfed.
Cello Music
There’s a girl up ahead of me
In the alley by the prison
On her knees in the sunlight
Picking up apricots
Fallen from her bag
Her torn brown paper bag.
She’s not in any rush.
Now she’ll
Stand up and go home.
She’ll play cello by the window.
I imagine everyone I see
Playing cello alone, by the window.
A London Girl In Granada
She hurtles through
The city streets
A candent shuttle in its’ loom
Weft-face woven
Warp thread hidden
Warp speed-driven
Natives
Petrified
By her velocity
As she weaves
Sidereal tapestries
Of particle and wave.
Jon Whitbread is currently studying for his MA Fine Art (Sculpture) at the Open College of the Arts and teaching Stonemasonry, Carving And Sculpture at the Building Crafts College in London, pausing occasionally to look at the world around him and see what words might apply.
