Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
Birthplaces, poems by Lincoln Jaques.
Birthplaces
A suburban stop on the South-Eastern line.
I step off the train to a cold platform.
Rivets loosely hold memories together
in precarious rust-stained images.
The rain doesn’t cease. Slick wet concrete
slips under soles. I was a child here once.
When Dark Side of the Moon was released.
The year the IRA bombed London Victoria.
I escape the station. The train rolls away
into forgotten dreams. Fog sutures
the ear drums, I can hear only numbness
through which the homeless man prays.
There’s no time for homesickness:
Homesick for another home, not this one.
This one without a house, a windowless
shelter with chill winds blowing up collars.
I remember the reflections in cracked shopwindows
businesses boarded up, signs for the disenfranchised.
Feinstein called migration a “…split between loneliness
and disloyalty”. A place where we make ourselves strangers.
I’m 13,000 kilometres between lives. Country-less.
I’ve forged a new empire within the wet curb.
I keep walking, through the pouring rain,
through eternities that shift from moment to moment.
Through the Poundlands, the Primarks, the Godless 99p stores.
In the Eltham High Street a dreadlocked busker sings
Bob Marley on a 3-string guitar, a shoeless foot pulsing
a pedal in time with our arrhythmic hearts.
Here the starving winter ate up our fathers’ jobs.
The double-decker prison cells transported us
to factories and office shackles where the sun set at 3pm.
We hurried home in the dark to fried chips and gameshows.
And I pass, finally, the playground, still there
where my brothers sneaked cigarettes, the library
where I discovered Le Guinn and Lewis, the old
brick house where we lived like Dickens’ scared children.
I’d not returned home. I’d merely crossed a border
into an open hand that would soon clench shut.
Before I turned back, I thought I caught sight of my father
rounding a corner, pulling up his collar against the rain.
Rushdie
I sat in the hospital carpark
waiting for you, listening
to Salman Rushdie, a story
about Miss Rehana being swindled.
The trees dripping water
from leaves like giant
metronomes. Counting time.
The next day Rushdie is stabbed
while talking at a Writers Festival.
All the anticipation that accompanies
waiting. Miss Rehana to not join her husband
in Bradford, me waiting for you
to come out of the hospital with
the result.
All waiting to see if Rushdie
pulls through
Saturday Afternoon, Zagreb
We take the kids to see a show
at the Puppet Theatre on Zagreb’s
Baruna Trenka. A puppeteer’s sick,
the show cancelled. Out back
is a playground where we sit drinking
coffee while the kids glide down slides.
The families all stay put, we refuse
to let the cancelled Puss in Boots
show get to us. Later I walk out
from the alleyway of the theatre
and am surprised by your brother
who drives up in his Škoda. He
parks at the curb and gets out, waving.
I turn and stroll down to the nearby
Tomislav Square where I sit and watch
the trams filled with afternoon shoppers
empty into the train station. It is one
of those calm afternoons in Zagreb
where everyone seems to forget
they have lives waiting somewhere,
like any Saturday afternoon, anywhere.
Travelling with Mountains
The world cannot go back to itself again
the dead fires wave to me through
the distances I’ll never negotiate; the mountains
remain silent, they dread winter, the grey
city ahead bitten by autumn’s thorns
the thinning sky a vein about to burst.
My heart is not here for it never returned
being lost between the mirror of stars.
We could walk forever but our footsteps
would never make an imprint.
For the road reinvents itself as roads do
holding us in its recurrent wonder.
We grip onto the past
like the weakened edges of mountains.
At the end of the highway sits a blind eagle
sniffing for its prey, seeking to become
itself once again, while we travel
those immeasurable distances.
© Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa, the USA, Asia, the United Kingdom and Australia, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Tarot, Burrow, Book of Matches, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem. He was Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and was guest editor for the 2023 and 2024 Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets & Writers editions. He won the 2025 International Writers Workshop (IWW) Ekphrastic writing competition.