I’ve never heard you sing. Although you make,
daily, those same three notes. A humming-bird
is much less gentle. It’s not a song that’s strained –
it’s unconscious. It’s a tune you’ve never heard,
un-trilled, but that you endlessly repeat
like a motif or a ritual word
and now I point it out and so deplete
the only real music on the earth
to say that hidden, set and buried deep
beneath the steel is a heart that burns.
Author: squidditas
Whaddupp, my name is Sam Hickford. I am due to graduate my PhD from St Andrews in December. I wrote about Clare and contemporary poetry. I have a book, Poems Sketched Upon the M60, published in 2021. I have quite a few academic papers which you can find here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Hickford. I publish other people here too, but unless it is signalled that someone else is the author, I am the author.
Journalism portfolio
My freelance journalist work has been published mainly in The Guardian and the Catholic Herald. It always relies on careful field work, long interviews and non-judgemental immersion into unfamiliar situations in order to gain a deeper perspective. It focuses on a combination of spiritual themes and social issues. My journalist style is influenced by Louis Theroux, John Ronson and Will Self. When commissioned, I tend to get around in as environmentally-friendly ways as possible. I am currently working on a piece for The Tablet about Camphill and L’Arche communities and their place in modern social care practice.
You can trust me to do a very diligent job, but I can also work fast if this is required!
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/festival-ready/2016/jul/22/no-drink-no-drugs-whats-drawing-young-people-to-teetotal-festivals – Explores the diverse reasons for teetotal festivals. Involved attending Buddhafield and individually meeting teetotal festival organisers in Petersfield and Nottingham.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/02/gap-year-stories-getting-a-taste-of-communal-living – Discusses my experiences in London Catholic Worker, an intentional community and refugee shelter I lived in for a long time.
Catholic Herald
7th+April+2018 – ‘Rise of the urban monks’: a piece evaluating “urban monasticism”, in which I visited people in places like St. Mary Aldermary and St. Luke’s in Peckham.
26th+May+2018 – ‘A lonely alcoholic’s poetic quest for God’. A piece about Lionel Johnson, a little-known Catholic poet of the nineteenth century.
Going Under
Going Under
A sea of silence sometimes strikes this bed –
a shore of sedatives. Sounds are separated
at first: a pillow’s plink against my head,
then I give my arm. I writhe against the fate
you’ve decreed: drugs that wash the rivers bled
in secrecy. Fearfully I meditate
out loud. I’ve got some “poems”. Three or four
describing silence. Then I hit the sea-floor
head-first: a screech of sound, absence. A death
sort of desired, arrives, or permeates?
My gosh. Well? How long was I under for?
Only a quatrain? Gosh. I want to *leave* the shore.
Font
My ongoing wrestling match with the villanelle form.
Swaddled in those black and gold
silent depths of painted stone,
people drown! But they then glow
as “new life” snakes up from below
and doves are swimming in the light
swaddled in that black-and-gold,
although the colour left. Although
these doves have swelled to grey from white
and all the drowned began to grow.
Grown Gortoners resented those
deceiving gushes of new life
that swim in dried-up black-and-gold
and hacked that font and bruised the stone.
(A car park.) It decays outside
and sprouting in its blackened old
mouth are twists of overgrowth.
Scrabble II
As – alas – love dies, reserve
for me, dear lover, the last force
felt. Then blast, eject, preserve
each pique. Lovers gaze, adore,
(endear!?), and mourn, preserved
coy, in twain, blinking,
lay, at gibe, to dug rot.
Lit. Ex. (I)
Scrabble I
Rules:
- Each poem must be made from words formed in a hypothetical game of Scrabble, in order, with no inserted or deleted letters. Multiple words count.
- Any letters left over must be declared. One should have no letters left over although one or two is acceptable.
- Inventing words is okay.
- Each poem must be a functioning stand-alone poem that makes sense.
So soon? For newly wax before the sky
javelins firing in jets of night
zephyring toward the quiet moon.
Then our sail glides, limber or nude
to cover: an arc. A….
No, that won’t do. A blank page will never speak
the stirs of silence that will overtake
all sense, rather than just alleviate
the daily headaches of our Twitter feed.
Fine. I’ll try to show you what I mean.
You see? Here we are. Right back again
where we left it. Dry old patterns on a screen
(or page!?), type-faced. It simply does not work.
Like an interval within a play,
maybe. After B and A’s exchange
They take a break. You fill in every word
when “silence” is so much more. It is, I’d say,
Grail Sonnets
This is a sequence of sonnets, all of which are missing one vowel, for pointless pretentious reasons that the Reader is best left to discover.
Grail Sonnet IV
Every other moment blue-grey slabs of stone
are sculpted as a monument of dawn
and she appears as clear as before –
but, because you haven’t ever loved a ghost
you get ready for another day alone.
But then you feel her press these marble claws
and hear her, gentle, enter through your core,
and occupy your body as a host.
You’ve never even loved a ghost before
and assumed somehow a ghost’s one human form
but her ghost’s every ghost you heard that day
or every sound that scraped the hard, stone floor
or other ghost that laboured to be born
under the sculpture of that blue-and-grey.
Squidditas 