Name: Crossing the Tees
Duration: P00H02M22S
Description: Poem set to music

Crossing the Tees

by Project Lono

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Poem set to music

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Crossing the Tees

As if she’s locked expectation
in a dead man’s chest and buried it
deep in her sludge and her silt,
the river today is ambivalent,
can’t decide what colour she wants to be,
refusing flat out to follow the sky’s direction
and trying her damnedest not to think about
wherever she’s heading, what’s around
the next meander and how far it is
to the open sea. This is the way

of keeping the tears in check,
of getting on with the getting on
not to place blue hopefulness
on anyone’s display shelf, as if
simultaneously resisting
acknowledging the presence of things
with a given name while being unable
to ignore the tell-tale signs of change,

it’s this, which is a tentative kind of love,
that creates a heavy absence, the dull fullness
of nothing, that is all about waiting, of cushioning
patience, although there are crests and furrows
like goose-bumps across her skin. Under
the suspended weight of bridges she forgets
herself momentarily in reflections of cooling
towers, cranes and cargo ships, the splash
of a pale wing wheeling over legers of salt.

She is dragging the past into the present
like the wide train of a ceremonial dress
then binding it around her eyes as a blindfold
to step inevitably into the future that lies
beyond the reach of concrete breakwaters.

credits

released February 6, 2022
Poetry written and performed by Bob Beagrie
Music by SJ Forth

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Project Lono Middlesbrough, UK

Project Lono is a collaborative collective of musicians and poets experimenting with audio scapes that blend verse, storytelling, song, music and live and recorded sound effects.

The Shrouded Republic has been created by Bob Beagrie, Sara Dennis, Kev Howard, Peter Lagan, John Dunleavy and SJ Forth.

Band picture by Kev Howard. ... more

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