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Leanne Moden
Lizzy Doe
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the poet
Leanne Moden is a poet, performer and educator based in Nottingham, UK. She's performed at WOMAD, Sofar Sounds, Bestival on the Isle of Wight, the Fourth Wave Feminist Festival, Trinity College Cambridge, and the TEDx WOMEN event at University College London. Leanne was a semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam 2018, and a national finalist at both the Hammer and Tongue Poetry Slam in 2016 and the Camden Roundhouse Slam in 2014. She took her first solo show, Skip, Skip, Skip, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, and in 2020 published her second poetry pamphlet, Get Over Yourself.
the poems
Becalmed
A Golden Shovel after Mary Oliver
I wanted to be the kind of someone
who could always fix things. I
clung to my competency like hull-side barnacles. To be loved,
you must be good enough and I was, once.
Back when the sight of the sea still gave
me chills. Now, I don’t know what will become of me.
I am a storm-sunk schooner, rigging unravelling. I am a
boatyard ransacked by vandals, and I can’t find the box
where I stored my secrets. I am so full
of nothings; regretful ghostly half-recollections. Fearful of
everything I can no longer do. Forgetting is a kind of darkness,
a mist that thickens slowly, by degrees. It
is so much harder to navigate when the stars are extinguished. It took
so long to realise what was happening to me;
on the journeys between the kettle and the sofa, years
passed. Now, I am left alone to
make catalogues of the missing parts. Understand
this: there is no way that
I can know what is absent. The blank space is this
unmarked page in my logbook. A fog too
heavy to ever lift again. If I was
still a sailing man then maybe I could endure this forecast as a
storm passing. But today, it feels more like penance than a gift.
Creation with an Axe
A blazing, sanguinary wound of light,
this reddish star – our sun – a brutal breach.
The viscera of moonlight bleeds through night
and stains the sky with triumphs out of reach.
While shoulder blade tectonics move beneath
the sinew soil of slowly shifting dunes,
Creation swings its axe and grinds its teeth
and softly hums an ever-changing tune.
A god can give their body to the earth,
their bones transferred to sediment and scree.
A violent world demands a violent birth;
the axe must bite the bark to fell the tree.
A god can give their body to the earth;
a violent world demands a violent birth.
Humanity
This is humanity:
sit back and let everything fall apart.
It is ridiculous to assume we would want to
help people we don’t even know.
We will go out of our way to
seal ourselves off from our problems.
We will never
think about others before ourselves.
We can’t contemplate the future so
we’ve stopped trying.
We can’t imagine a world where
there is hope.
There is hope.
We can’t imagine a world where
we’ve stopped trying.
We can’t contemplate the future so
think about others before ourselves.
We will never
seal ourselves off from our problems.
We will go out of our way to
help people we don’t even know.
It is ridiculous to assume we would want to
sit back and let everything fall apart.
This is humanity.
Publishing credits
Creation with an Axe: Hecate Literary Magazine (Issue 1)
Becalmed: Dear Reader
Humanity: Dreich (Season Three, No. 12)
S h a r e