Greta Sykes – A table and two chairs

Profile Sykes LEP&W June 2021

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2021

Poet, writer and artist Greta Sykes has published her work in many anthologies. She is a member of London Voices Poetry Group and also produces art work for them. Her new volume of poetry called ‘The Shipping News and Other Poems’ came out in August 2016. The German translation of her book ‘Under charred skies’ has now been published in Germany under the title ‘Unter verbranntem Himmel’ by Eulenspiegel Verlag. She is the chair of the Socialist History Society and has organised joint poetry events for them at the Poetry Café. She is a trained child psychologist and has taught at the Institute of Education, London University, where she is now an associate researcher. Her particular focus is now on women’s emancipation and antiquity. Twitter: @g4gaia.      Facebook.com/greta.sykes.      German Wikipedia: Greta Sykes.

THE DEFEAT OF GILGAMESH
An ancient epic history of love and power by Greta Sykes.
Available at https://www.gretasykes.com/
Amazon, bookshops and publisher https://www.austinmacauley.com/book/%C2%A0defeat-gilgamesh


A table and two chairs

The lockdown plague
Caused by humans,
No kisses, no touch, no hugs.
A lamppost leaning to drink your coffee.
A draughty street corner to eat your sandwich.
You spread pestilence among nature.
You’ve reverted to unicellular.
You’re alone, just one,
Moored to the early earth’s unicellular life.

Then the archaea, bacteria warmed
Lonely single cell beings using the sun,
And multicellular life could begin.
That was on the 12th of April 2021.
I bought a sandwich
And found a chair at a table
To sit with you, Maria,
On the other chair.

Talking together
of love and despair,
happiness and sadness,
childbirth and death.
We had become multicellular.
A quantum leap into connectedness
By way of a table and two chairs,
We could restart civilisation,
A house, a village, temples
And a school.


Spring

Spring twists and starts, it jolts and jerks,
It shudders and shivers,
It jitters in fevers of spasms of life
Of ecstasy in shimmering light
Of sudden blossoms
Blurring my vision,
my heart is throbbing
with spring’s joyful sobbing.


The full moon

I bedded the moon,
Numinous mana,
In the morning hours,
The radiant beam lay in my bed.


Betula pendula

Deciduous beauty in spring.
Like the heaven’s chandelier
with a thousand golden
Catkins incandescent.


© Greta Sykes