Author: Pete Aki'i

. Here I am, approaching seventy-five, and now I see it: I am a bridge.  A quiet span between what was and what’s still becoming. I was born in one Britain, now I’m parked in its digital offspring. Coal smoke, milk floats, tin baths, mangle wheels turning in back-kitchen gloom. Pavements patchy with hopscotch chalk, […]

That hour won’t return Footprints fill with river rain I stand with what stays

I was told of a fellow named *Russell one day, who apparently died (well sort of) in May, then returned from a coma of thirty-nine nights to declare that all matter is… crystallised lights? . Now I’m no philosopher, truthfully, friend, I’m the sort who forgets how a sentence should end! So imagine my panic […]

For Madame Abomah There are those who measured her inches but missed the weight of her will. They saw six-foot-ten inches of spectacle and none of the woman still. They named her Abomah, like fable plucked from Dahomey flame. Crowned her ‘Queen of the Giants’, yet they never asked her name. . Take this stand, […]

THE BEAUTIFUL VIOLENCE OF BECOMING!Two separate poems, but, as I’ve today realised belong together as a ‘diptych’. ‘Standing Out’ is the assault, the shaping pressure of malice.‘Still Standing’ shows how the internal alchemy of risk, gratitude and defiant life follows. I. STANDING OUT They spat hatred at himtwisted, savage cursesshaped to wound.Still, inside,he knew he […]

There’s nothing in the caterpillar to hint at what’s to come, that it will unfurl into a butterfly beneath the hush of summer sun. The humble, drifting butterfly, a small embodiment of joy, raises little more than a smile yet, can stir your pulse into the sky. . They say its silent wing beats can […]

Maybe now is the time to give yourself time to crouch behind the hillock until the wind forgets your name. Endure what you can as the scouring pad of despair scrapes the mind’s soft interior, paring your dreams to dust, to near-nothing. This is when and precisely why you must remain hopeful. Why your quiet […]

He falls again, and still his country waits for the thud but – there is no thud when a man has carved away the floor beneath him. There is only faster, deeper, falling. On a day meant for grace and thanks he opens the sewer of his heart and plunges in, hurling slurs built from […]

The world breaks everyone. Quietly at first, like fog through stone, then louder, until the fault lines show, in places even we don’t know. It snaps the string that’s tuned too tight, But listen. casts shadows of angst beneath its light, scuffs your name with wind and sand until you barely understand what held you […]

There are those who guard gates like coffins, others, plant seeds in the soil. Politicos do the former, polishing padlocks with fear, selling the chain as a gift to the loyal. . He names ‘illegal’ as if holy scripture, tattoos deport on the nation’s tongue. His tweets march in formation detain, return, remove the vocabulary […]