Last Tuesday was Poetry Platform again – a night for “linguistical renegades and literary marvels” as it has so humbly been dubbed by its small community.

Initially settled at the Railway Inn in Winchester, Poetry Platform now takes place in living rooms and flats around England. Of course, it’s not the same as meeting up in a pub attic surrounded by the scraping of chairs, feeling the condensation of a cold Kopperberg in your hands and listening to people picking their heart out of the seams of their pockets, but you know – the next best thing to just not having any sort of spoken word poetry in your life at all. I used to attend these events monthly while I lived in England, and now I honestly believe that the one good thing to come out of this pandemic is Poetry Platform going online, so I can join in from Norway.

I did two poems on Tuesday, both centered around the notion of building a home for and with the people you care about.

The first poem (hyperlink to text) is a rather new one, thought up one evening on the floor mid-play with my nephew who’s a year and a half. It’s a response to a poem I wrote when I was 21 and terrified of the notion of ever settling down anywhere, worried of not getting the “making a home” right (whatever “right” even means). Fast forward to now and I guess the cliched realisation that’s hit is that creating a home isn’t so much about what it looks like and more about what you do with it.

The second one is for Soph, a wonderful friend who braved the world and let me be part of her adventure when she moved to Norway for a year in 2019. This poem was supposed to be a thanks for letting me fill her time with cups of tea and movie nights in the tiny uni room we made to feel like home for a while.

-Andrea