Animals Live in My Lungs

In early 2020 I was invited by the Illuminate Rotherhithe community project to write a poem about migration, specifically inspired by the Mayflower pilgrims, to perform at their community celebration later in the year. That event never took place - it was one of the first I was connected with to be cancelled by the pandemic.

This year, Illuminate Rotherhithe came back, and asked me to write and perform a poem about this year's core theme - TREES.

I knew I was set to perform the poem at the bandstand of Southwark Park, so took a wander down there to see what trees would be around us. It's almost all London Planes; suitable for a festival whose core theme is migration since London Planes are not strictly native at all, being a hybrid (deliberate or accidental) of Planes orient- and occidental. They've become such a familiar and welcome part of the urban landscape of our capital that they bear its name.

I asked Pat Kingwell - a man with extraordinary knowledge of Southwark Park - for any info that might be helpful about these trees, and characteristically he was able to send me several pages of their history in the park.

I also spent time at Southwark Archives, poring through their material covering the history of open spaces of Southwark, including of Ada Salter's Beautification Committee. The picture mentioned in the poem can be seen here.

Together with a little time spent among the trees themselves, these research materials inspired the poem I introduced at the bandstand. It can be read in full on the Illuminate Rotherhithe website - I'm also sharing the text in full below, as while it's fine on my laptop, I had a little trouble with the format of that page on my phone.

This was first presented in front of a crowd of local people holding handmade lanterns that depicted the animals mentioned in the poem, and many more - there can hardly be a better circumstance for a poem to meet the world in, and I am grateful to have had that honour.

Animals Live in My Lungs
for Illuminate Rotherhithe 2022
with thanks to Patrick Kingwell of Friends of Southwark Park
and to Dr Patricia Dark and the staff of Southwark Archives

A friend once told me that writing is like having an external brain.
If you have a thought, and you write it, 
then that thought exists outside of you.
Once it’s written, the thought exists outside of your body
and it stays there.
You don’t need to keep it in your brain any more.
Once you can write, the whole world becomes your brain.
You can put thoughts anywhere.

Most animals can’t do that, 
so all their thoughts (near enough) stay inside them.
Because we (humans) can -
because we have external brains -
we like to make believe we’re not really animals.
But we are. We are animals
and we have to remember it.

Here’s another organ we can have outside of ourselves
as well as inside:
lungs. (breathe in)
The trees and the parks are like our external lungs
they breathe for us
they purify the air.

The trees are our external lungs.

Animals live in my lungs:
this and that,
squirrel and bat;
these and those,
bees and crows.

In a picture from ninety-three years ago
in the carefully catalogued drawers 
of the Local History Library on Borough High Street,
Alfred and Ada Salter hold spades
as one of my lungs is planted in the ground.
The mayor looks on in his chain
at the official ceremony of the planting of my lung.
People are gathered all around
to see the lung go into the earth
knowing it will flourish.

The bottom of my lung is submerged in the dark soil -
but this lung is so long and tall, even at its planting,
that it goes right out of the top of the photograph,
as if reaching into heaven,
to purify the air of heaven.

So here we are surrounded by our lungs
hundreds of them put here in the late 19th century
at a cost of two shillings a piece -
a cheap price for a vital organ.

Animals live in our lungs.
They sing here. They breathe here.
We are animals. 
Let’s sing
Let’s breathe
Let’s celebrate
Our lungs.