Welcome to Julie Lamin - Write With Me Substack and my weekly posts sharing reflections on writers and writing in relation to significant dates in the year.
Write With Me posts give you tips, ideas and inspiration for your own creative and non-fiction writing, whatever your age, stage or state of your page, followed by Writing Challenges. Support my writing by upgrading to a paid subscription with free writing tutorials and my book, ‘Beyond the Volcano’, while stocks last.
I have vast experience of teaching and tutoring GCSE and A level students and mentoring for writers. Contact: julie@julielaminauthor.com
A very big thank you!
For the last few weeks, I have been announcing the Wordsmithery event at which I was guest poet along with singer-songwriter, Thom Morecroft.
Finally, Wednesday arrived and I had a wonderful evening, thanks to Alison Schultz for the invitation and to my lovely family and friends for coming along and making the evening so special.
The evening got off to a strong start listening to talented Thom Morecroft’s powerful songs, followed by my first series of poems, then Thom played his second set followed by my second series.
Following a break of meeting old friends and new poets, selling and signing books, the open mic session was a lovely opportunity to hear more music and poetry. I would strongly urge anyone who has written original music and/or poetry to get out there to an open mic event and not wait for decades as I have done! If you live on Merseyside, Wordsmithery is the third Wednesday of the month.
I am lucky and grateful to have such wonderful family and friends and lucky to be married to Hayden who organised the filming of Wednesday’s event and the trickier downloading and editing the next day. So this week and next, I am sharing the poetry event as filmed. At Wordsmithery, performers each have two twenty-minute sessions, so this week is the first (twenty minutes of your time in one week is greatly appreciated) and the second next week.
Quite a few of you have asked for the words to some of the poems. Here are the words to Grievitude and We Are Women from the first part of the programme. I briefly explain the context of each poem in my introduction.
I’ll post the words to poems as requested next week with the second part.
If you would like ask me about a poem, please get in touch: julie@julielaminauthor.com
Grievitude
You were there at my beginning.
I will be here at your end.
We have shared the albums now:
Youthful, beautiful you, sparkling eyes;
Dancing, playing, walking, singing.
I am grateful for the years we’ve had
My best and lifelong friend.
At the beginning of your end
I stilled your shaking hand,
Wiped away the tea and coffee spilled.
And, when your memory played hide-and-seek
Found your purse and wrote reality in a book.
When you were no longer safe,
We played a game of let’s pretend:
Me wardrobe mistress to your great scenes,
Secretly packing away your elegance.
No grand finale; no curtain-call
Only a last closing of your front door.
Now at the podium of your care home bed,
I kneel each day to its rise and fall
Waiting for the cast of angels to appear.
Your words fly hoarse and unrehearsed,
I ad-lib an elegy from myriad memories
Sing of joy and gratitude; no praise left unsaid.
I tell you it is June, the month we met
When I was born:
For you were there at my beginning,
And I will be here at your end.
Love is the word mostly heard: your living legacy.
I name all those whose lives you changed,
Vow to carry the baton of love to my days’ end.
Grievitude: one more day of gratitude;
One more day of grief.
I say goodbye, until tomorrow,
For you were there at my beginning
And I am with you at your end.
Julie Lamin 17 June 2024We are Women
We are women we are strong, we are fighting for our lives
Side by side with our men who work the nation’s mines.
United by the struggle, united by the past
And it’s ‘Here we go! Here we go!’
For the women of the working class.
(This is the chorus to ‘Women of the Working Class’ written and originally performed by Mal Finch)
We are outside Liverpool Town Hall
On International Women’s Day, 2017,
Singing in soft March sunshine.
The crowds hush and stand still
As we take them back four decades to our calls
Of ‘Coal Not Dole’, and rattles for cash
To feed the hungry families of our country’s mines.
I am in a Maths lesson in Wakefield, Yorkshire,
On Thursday morning, 22 March, 1973.
We speak in hushed tones in soft sunshine,
But the only numbers that count today are one and seven -
The boy in our class whose father is missing -
And seven men trapped in the Lofthouse mine.
Pit-wheels and slag-heaps our landscape,
We knew the seams ran under our feet
And occasionally opened to swallow the earth.
We knew the dust of coal was in our money, shaped our lives,
But we did not know until then the price of coal:
Dying in the pit and dying on the dole.
The Mersey has flowed through my life for forty years,
But when I sing the women’s words from the Miners’ Strike
I know my soul roots down in the dark earth still,
Down to the jewel of coal and its price of blood.
Our song ends and a young woman, researching song,
Asks why we sing. I say:
When I open my throat with the women's words,
The unsung heroes rise from the past
And step in to today’s March light. We bring
In our own small way, their loss back to life.
Once again, a huge thank you to all who came along on Wednesday and for your encouraging comments. If you couldn't make it, thanks in advance for taking time to watch the show!
Share this post