NEWS & BLOG
11 July, 2022 - By Catherine Davidson
Poetry Games
Since West London Welcome first opened back in 2018, writer Anna Perera and I have been running our reading and writing group at the centre every week on Thursdays. With our refugee and migrant community we’ve read novels, short stories and poetry, and sometimes even manage to get a few poems written.
At our Refugee Week celebration last month, we ran a ‘Poetry Games’ booth. Anyone could come and try out a game.
Playing Word Games, people chose from a list of nouns, verbs and adjectives, based on randomly generated numbers – like their birthdays or friends’ birthdays – then used the words to write lines.
In our Write a Grape game, you could pick a grape from our bunch, write a physical description using the five senses and then leap into imagination using prompts like – if a grape were a person, what secret would it tell you? If a grape were a dream, what would it be?
We got some great poems and had a lot of fun. Here’s some of our community’s work:
Joseph’s Grape
Looks like full moon
Reminds me of my first kiss
Feels like my cat’s paws,
Smells like a granny’s garden.
Sunflower, having soft, strong wings
Just my inner child, riding a horse
Behind my fake father
Hope bends the young leaf
The moon chases a giant chair
The moon gives me its shiny hand
Birth gives us a giant cup
The sky paints warm apples
Eyes imagine green birds
– By a member of West London Welcome
The grape is purple and it is round
It is soft inside but the shell is rough
It has a sweet scent
If a grape were a planet, it would be Neptune
If a grape told you a secret, it would be
That other fruits are jealous
Because with it you can make wine
– By a member of West London Welcome
Catherine Davidson is a poet and novelist of Greek and Jewish heritage from California, living in West London. She teaches at Regent’s University, Amnesty International, Kite Studio, and Exiled Writers Ink. She is the author of The Priest Fainted, two pamphlet collections of poetry, and the novel, the Orchard.
Anna Perera, novelist, born in London, of Sri Lankan and Irish heritage. After teaching in secondary schools and running a unit for excluded teenage boys, Anna studied creative writing. Her critically acclaimed novel, Guantanamo Boy, was nominated for numerous awards, has been translated into a dozen languages, and was adapted as a stage play. The Glass Collector, set in Cairo, was also nominated for the Carnegie Medal. The Whole of the Moon is her latest novel.
