Josef Minter
Poet. First performed as part of ISWAS International Storytelling Festival 2024. Part of Manchester Histories Festival 2024.
YESTERDAY.
It started,
As whispered words, an incantation:
Benzie.
Cavendish.
Dalton.
Grosvenor.
Manton.
All Saints.
A dream,
that out of darkness,
And the weighted clouds of soot,
From Blake’s dark satanic mills,
A lifeline and a future was possible.
Where hard-working hands,
Could be allied,
With infinitely malleable minds
To imagine the future.
Wrest it into being.
The spark was lit.
And while the great and good carried it forward,
there was blood at the start- still unaccounted for,
debts and reparations unpaid,
slave names lost to time,
a history that’s screaming to be written.
An account,
outstanding.
Later,
Art took the lead.
Skill and genius,
Learning by doing,
Being,
a route forward,
Out of poverty and ignorance,
Time saw merging and cross-pollination, cooperation, and conquest,
Reaching out into the suburbs.
The fragments adding to the whole.
Courses for all horses,
The latest, the newest alongside the historical and essential.
And at the centre of everything
teachers, librarians,
technicians, cleaners cooks,
The people made the university.
Some,
acknowledged with plaques and plaudits,
but so many others who simply make this place their life,
along with the students,
blurred faces in archive photos ,
who would get lost here,
or find the places they held dear,
as sanctuary and progress,
no longer exist.
I know.
At Didsbury this old dog learnt new tricks,
Many lives were lived,
While learning to be.
Benzie.
Cavendish.
Dalton.
Grosvenor.
Manton.
All Saints.
Hollings.
Exterior as important as interior,
Towers raised in the white heat of technology,
Could be a beacon to the future,
Without obliterating the past.
Only Manchester could have a toast rack!
Rising high from suburban splendour,
A slice of the city,
Popping up provocatively:
“Use your loaf son, it’s an essay in modernism”.
Which also made the brutalist,
most beautiful.
Bridges in the sky and theatres underground,
this palpable idea of progress embodied in the buildings.
Names that overtime have become shorthand for invention,
whispered by St Augustine, in prayers:
Benzie.
Cavendish.
Dalton.
Grosvenor.
Manton.
All Saints?
But with pasts.
The cost of progress not yet fully accounted for,
a city changed and warped by the rise of a complex of walled off institutions.
That are of here yet separate.
That rub up against the city,
like a sometimes-unwelcome fellow commuter on a steamy bus down Oxford Road,
or a sheet of sandpaper on your record shelf.
That exist sometimes in a vacuum of privilege and exclusivity.
Alongside,
Poverty,
of opportunity,
of access,
of ownership.
A city within a city.
Towers which in one light might seem ivory white,
Are at other times houses of light,
Welcoming lost ships into safe harbours,
Guiding us to a different and more beautiful tomorrow.
With the sound of hammer, striking a single bell.
©Josef Minta 2024
TODAY
It started with a walk.
Circling, feeling the weight of this place.
Gravity,
On the space time of Manchester.
This atomic centre.
Trying to find and trace a line back,
To that big bang,
That moment and that distant dream.
A voice that whispered,
Yes.
Now.
Today.
What was the first sign?
Anvil Street.
Feeling the hand of the mechanics on my shoulder,
Old little Ireland,
Built.
Vacated.
Demolished.
Forgotten.
Before seeing the seated figure of Dalton,
Surveying what? I wonder from his eyes,
In a box in a museum drawer.
Touch the stone.
Walk the perimeter.
Copper green
Verdigris to red brick
Brown stone to concrete
And miles of glass to the neon now.
Bisected by the languid turn of the Mancunian way,
Curved like a wing,
Caught in a flight of motion.
The story of stone.
Tracing the same line from institute to college to poly to uni,
In the rise of towers,
Stacked up behind aspirational Roman columns,
Where a dream of modern Africa was shaped,
And shone bright,
onto burnished orange as a facsimile sun- permanent against the usual pigeon grey which we grudgingly love as uniquely ours.
Castles.
Guarded by sometimes impenetrable walls that have risen and pushed ,
Forward with a city,
And sometimes against.
Where rising rent prices out the locals,
resentment can build,
towards those,
Who make Manchester their temporary home.
A transitory population.
Housed in manufactured villages.
Where other communities once lived, worked, played and thrived,
singular windows,
With bottles, stickers, slogans and songs,
Unique lives, boxed up and ready,
For some kind of awakening.
Before leaving,
With unknown solutions to impossible problems,
Scattered, like a chaos of blossom which for a moment covers everything,
Splashes of rare colour on the concrete.
Those disparate atoms drawn,
To the centre.
The nucleus.
Adding to the whole.
Action- interaction_ to chain reaction.
The old buildings demolished and replaced,
The debt paid and carried,
repaid,
In a future reshaped,
By the voices that now
Say:
We are here and this is what we think,
this,
Is what the future can be.
The stone speaks when you listen
Telling unheard stories.
©Josef Minta 2024
TOMORROW
It started with
A book,
A shelf,
A dream,
A story,
yet to be told.
Will you remake this world?
Remodel
Remould
This book, on a shelf as yet unwritten,
belongs to you.
That somehow,
You,
Through graft, guile and imagination,
wrought out of nothing into being.
Dig.
Discover.
Light out of darkness.
Form from some base material,
it might feel a little like magic mercurial and ever shifting,
In the un-yet activated synapses of your mind
The nucleus of thoughts.
That are competing with an onslaught of data,
And demands,
Deadlines and a lack of deadtimes in which to form,
New and shining ideas.
Precious as a vase
and as radical as a rock, thrown
to shatter the now.
You.
Will somehow bring this into being.
This radical new movement, this revaluation of something forgotten.
This knowledge.
Hold it tight for so long it will make your hands and your mind ache before it finds a place
On a shelf,
In a building as yet unbuilt.
Formless, like a cloud pinned to the sky,
Which started with an idea that perhaps felt like it was going out of fashion.
Libraries are important.
A continuum of progress and a symbol of an ambition.
A monument.
That will alter the skyline of the city
And the landscape of the mind.
Glass and neon reaching into the too often greying Manchester skies
To light the horizon
As a guiding beacon to this,
This thing called knowledge.
As slippery to get hold of as Manchester rain
Or that thin edge of summer,
Reflected on the mirrored glass,
That will house,
Hold and cherish,
Hopes for the future.
On shelves not yet built.
Perhaps your book will sit,
Dusting, slowly destroying itself,
The love that you poured into it
Lost,
For a long time.
Its card unmarked. Until another soul,
Fellow traveller,
Will seek out your story to tell.
Find themselves in it.
And with you by their side,
Save us all from ourselves.
Because the answer is here,
The solution to the puzzle of the future
Is within you.
Nestled spark to burning ember,
Guiding light to flaming torch,
bringing clarity, showing us the way
Out of the darkness.
©Josef Minta 2024
