Bleak Sunlight

A collaborative slow renga written by Fiona Lesley Bennett, Andrea Witzke Slot, Eve Lyons, and Katherine Perry from January-April, 2017

Wild geese streaming in ribbons
across the sky, too many to count
like the women, marching

and bundled in winter coats, knitted hats,
flying together through historic streets.

Branches brush windows,
while sleepers toss violently.
Televisions glow,

the moon glows, lies low in the sky.
The crowd roars with chants and cheers.

A daughter peers through solid glass;
bleak sunlight appears on the swept kitchen floor.
She watches orange fade into white.

The air tepid and full of threat
as day breaks on dark water.

Yellow light spreads gold and purple
soon the sun's angry glare will be here,
we'll play in the ocean.

She chewed the mandarin peel, waiting.
Without paying, she took three more and ran.

A masterclass in initiative, just him
and the chair, the different ways
you could get up out of it.

Leaves decompose, become dirt.
We all have to let go sometimes.

In cupped palms, she cradles an orchid:
not a ghost or impossible-to-find rarity,
but standard white petals promising fertility.

Morning’s milky mist falls soft on worried lands.
Children wake in the flowers, blinking.

What Comes Back To Me

By Fiona Lesley Bennett                               for Massumi


Today is your birthday
I found out on Facebook
scrolling through seventy-two
in memoriam birthday grievings
my heart plummeting
to the floor of my gut
like an elevator with the cables snapped
eyes racing down screen after screen
a new technology prayer wheel from
your one hundred and eighty-six friends
none of whom can fathom how
at thirty-two cancer
could take you.

I can’t say stop the clocks.
I can’t claim that closeness after all
you slipped away over a month ago
a digit on my radar fading
unnocticed.

I count the times we did meet –
four five six?
Tokyo - perched on the edge
of a small wooden stage cradling
plastic cups of cheap red wine
your eyes creature bright
piercing the dust and the emptiness.
London - loud and certain voices
pushing the air to the wall you
leaning in seeking some kind of
gravity in the whirl of it all,
some kind of anchoring.
An empty bar at the station
three new friends waiting
for different trains laughter
jumping over one another’s words
your smooth brow puckering
as the first departure is called.

Each memory comes back to me
canopied with a billowing peace
something your presence blew gently in
your watchful smile, a kind of otherworldly
sweetening influence
so imperceptible
so undemanding
that we shone in it
oblivious.


Fiona is a theatre practitioner, trainer and poet. She is co-director of The Map Consortium, a group of artists facilitating change in a wide range of settings. Reading and writing poetry is her touchstone. The highlight of her journey as a poet to date was being part of Marge Piercy's 2010 juried workshop in Wellfleet. With her friend and colleague Subhadassi, she has just launched Renga for Japan - a poetry initiative raising awareness and funds around the effects of the Tsunami and nuclear accident that happened in Japan on March 13th, 2011. She lives in the UK dividing her time between London and North Wales.