Playlist Poem: Courtney Stoddart

A Playlist Poem by Courtney Stoddart for Book Week Scotland 2021

Reverance

I stand in reverence

With so much things to say right now

I’m bearing witness to visions and I see consciousness is shifting

Over hills and valleys too I hear the cry of the world

As we come one, she gives birth to a new earth

By her side a night nurse waits patiently, she sings her freedom song

It’s all mathematics the way she dances on her axis, the lifesaver

Perpetual radiance ensues, as it always has done and always will do

It bathes in places I never knew existed

I could wait 5 more months but now I wonder is time travel possible in a world bearing less limitations?

Truly, I ask are we not all one nation?

It’s after midnight, and I take a long walk

insomnia call’s me, she’s pondering possibilities

of natural mystic’s and dreams,

in this moment to myself I think of how some chase the devil

and some chase the bottle, the way of the explosive

suffocating under the weight of inner city blues, the mystery of iniquity

In parallel worlds holding simple things, here I come

Running up that hill and it’s sad to see that old slave mill

is grinding slow but grinding still

I think of my Grandma’s hands and how I can’t stand the rain

and how Babylon too rough and some trouble man they just cry tough

but that storm music can fill us with endless hallelujah’s

Ready or not, I get out, searching only to build a bridge

Who knows how we move on up before it all falls down like a lost memory?

In this silence that speaks only of exodus

lingering like misty mornings and positive vibrations

I think of upside down, borderlines

and how summertime brings the sun to me

and thus,

I stand in reverence