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31 Aug 2023
L Kiew
Full Moon
Sep 15th
Orebody
Aug 16th
In response to Goldmine
by Lisa Barnard
Testify, mine. Day finds
an adit into hillside.
Wind sung. Cracked open.
Miner-men entered, sunk
shafts into supporting rock.
Dark holds. Self-gold.
Men stope and repeat
till veins are voids
that rushing rain refills.
Midnight declines to pools.
Say silica. Say sediment.
Say sentiment. Say spoils.
You remain persistent. Awe.
Sing mine. Say ore.
Behind the poem...
Inspired by a photo from Lisa Barnard’s The Canary and the Hammer series – included in the Martin Parr Foundation’s 2022 Intersectional Geographies exhibition – I was struck by how societies exploit and extract from both the body of the earth and from female bodies. I see this exploitation as part of a continuum, and was interested in the nexus between sexual politics and mining economics. Throughout my poem, I use homophones to create an equivalence between the human and the non-human.
