Hyde Park Picture House: 100 in 2014!
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit cinematic on my blog during NaPoWriMo.
I’m reading a few poems (including my poem about the Invisible Cinema walking tour, from earlier in the month) on Sunday morning at an event to mark the centenary of Hyde Park Picture House. And here is a piece I wrote based on an earlier prompt from Canal Laureate Jo Bell, which was to write a poem of Welcome.
So, to celebrate the Picture House’s centenary, I wrote a welcome for its next 100 years – and here it is:
Twenty-One Thirteen
or, Dust Across the Beam
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may your bright skies usher in
the twenty-first century’s pigeons –
their future-coos upon the roof’s tiles
(not nesting in seats, feathering aisles).
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
the elaborate plaster flowers which grow
from the walls are the germinating magic bean
of all the cinemas to which we can no longer go.
A furrow of many bulbs (and most no longer glow).
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may the red curtains of each romance
open and close, close and open
on the clumsy ill-fated dance
of faltering fake yawns
and thousands of missed chances.
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may never the popcorn of cinema dreams
be trodden under giant flat-screen feet
confining chorus gasp, behind-you screams
to closed-curtain houses on sparse streets.
Welcome, twenty-one thirteen
and all the seconds in between:
may the 26-flicker of each second’s cell
combine with the terabytes of files, to tell
stories as many as dust across the beam.
For stories are light and light is the spell.
So welcome, twenty-one thirteen:
may all your future screens,
even in desperate certificate eighteens
times contain only some scenes
of the mildest peril.
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