Prayer before Flight
Prayer before Flight
(after Louis MacNeice)
I’m about to fly, so help me.
May the heaven-bound youth with a
lust for virgins miss my flight.
when the prodding wand comes my way
let it beep briefly, and be
gone
Archive for the 'travel' Category
Making (& unmaking) a State in the Name of Art
In time for the 2012 Cultural Olympaid, the UK will spend £5.4 million on 12 Artiste-led projects across the country. It was a great funding opportunity for artistes, and 2163 proposals were submitted out of which 59 were shortlisted. The winning project for the South West region will see the artiste, Alex Hartley, towing a piece of Nymark, a newly discovered island off the coast of Norway to the southern coast of England. It will apply for micronation status, apply for citizens, and try to out-populate the Vatican and Monaco before being towed back at the end of the project. The new nation will be liquidated (or whatever it is that happens to countries at the end of their life) There will be no rubble left over to blight the lovely seaside. Read more »
Sudan on YouTube
Okay, so I am a late adopter of technology, but I am getting there.
For my first YouTube video, I went back to the first poem I blogged here, Sudan. Sudan. (rendered without exclamations!) and blended in music and photographs. The photographs were mostly taken with my Canon 350D (which got me into a spot of bother with Sudan’s secret police, but that’s another story). But there are two exceptions: one photograph by Slovenian traveller, Tomo Kriznar, and another – of me – by… sorry I didn’t get his name. He was my Khartoum taxi-driver, I posed by a tree and he was kind enough to press the shutter. Nice shot by the way. Photography is easy. Especially with a point-and-shoot like a 350D set to easy-everything. Good thing I didn’t travel with the Mamiya RB67. Back to that YouTube thing:
Sudan! Sudan!
At a reading, someone once asked what inspired my poem, ‘Sudan! Sudan!’ The short answer was: crossing the longest river in the world, during a visit to the largest country in Africa. The long answer would have read something like this:
About
My name is Chuma Nwokolo. I am a writer and
lawyer currently living in Britain. Memories
of Stone is my first poetry collection. One
More Tale for the Road and Diaries
of a Dead African are my most recent novels, with Extinction
of Menai, forthcoming. Welcome to my blog.
more about »
