Hello again poetry and spoken word fans. Today we have a poem from local member of the Hull based, ‘Warren Spoken Word Collective’, Kelly Cartwright with a poem she’s entitled ‘Your Time Capsule’.
If you’re reading this, here it’s 2018-
All that comes from this time capsule, I give to you,
it contains some memories and what I’ve built to call dreams.
I’m sure where you are there’s a way to
build a time machine-
You’re reading this in the future, after all.
But hang on a moment. I’m curious…
Do you still read about the people I had to
in some yellow and old history book?
The revolutionaries called ‘revolutionary’
because they dared to believe in human decency,
or democracy,
identity,
equality.
Tell me no one bats an eyelid to a certain gender doing a certain job,
that the government you know was the one who stopped getting it wrong.
Tell me the working class actually get a say
instead of being forgotten between cradle and grave.
Tell me the apps didn’t get worse and that
we remembered to look up and say hello,
or how to have an actual chat
face to face, with words- believe it or not.
And if your brain behaves anything like mine,
darling, know that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
But tell me you were able to get help,
tell me you were believed.
Please tell me ‘attention-seeking’
was not how it was perceived.
Tell me actions now speak louder than mere words
and there are mechanisms built to help to cope-
Tell me people have stopped killing themselves
because they believed they couldn’t find any hope.
Did the winters stop feeling like summer
and are planes still being built?
Do people still travel abroad when they can just get a tan
if they find space on a local beach packed to the hilt?
If you look at the pictures in the top right side
those are some animals I grew up knowing about-
Because we were too selfish to mind otherwise,
darling, do you still know of those species
or did we fully kill them off one by one?
I hope it’s safe for you to be out on the streets,
I hope you’ll grow up going back to a simpler time,
where you’ll be free to just live and be who you want,
like some echo of my early life.
So the time capsule you have,
is right where I am back in 2018,
This is what I hope for the future,
something more than a crazy dream.
So, darling, go ahead and build your own-
Please bring it back here
and tell me
you’re proud to call this world a home.
Kelly Cartwright is spoken word artist living in Hull. Alongside spoken word, she also maintains a blog, writes novels, short stories and the occasional play. Some of her non-writing hobbies include reading, good music and looking after her rabbit.
Thanks for reading the work of another sterling author.
If you’re interested in spoken word prose or poetry and would like to share some of your work, why not get in touch? We’d love to hear from you!
Email: Andrew at spheremag dot com.
Stay tuned later this week for another thought provoking entry in our local poems series.
