The Warrior Butterfly (by sarah)
Tonight (21 st Nov 2014) I am going to be taking part in a Quiet Compare event at The Strand in Cheltenham. It is medical themed poetry so I am taking along a poem I have only ever performed twice before and never to a live audience that is sitting there just for poetry.
The poem is The Warrior Butterfly and chronicles the issues I had around the pregnancy and birth of Jean, I could write a lot on the imagery and what the poem means to me but I shall not. The two previous performances were: 1) Cheltenham Community Radio for one of their shows and 2) for the On Form Sculpture exhibition in Oxford a few years ago where I stood on an Earth work (made for the garden not an ancient burial site) that was covered in flowers and called it to the sky and the arty loving people who happened to be wandering about at the time.
It is a long and in many ways personally indulgent poem for me, not my normal but as such it is often not the right sort of thing to read at events and the actual reading of it is hard for me.
I hope local peeps might like to come out tonight to listen - it isn't just me performing a 4 and a half minute poem, there are lots of others performing too, some of whom you might even have heard of!
Anyway I'd better give it the read through a couple of times before tonight.
Here's the event details for those of you not on Facebook it is 7:30 at The Strand in Cheltenham with a £1/£2 suggested donation on the door.