Warren Mortimer

patchwork

after soft play, the rest of everything
is hard edged, mad and liable to smash —
the days line up like terracotta soldiers

while a barrage of sunlight finds focus,
sharpshot as it is in those murals
from Amarna, each ray

bent to the pure knot of an ankh
or an open palm bartering warmth
in rations — even my voice

has firmed to a chiselled core
of consonants —this mild hour
in which I read you Elmer’s fate,

building your tiered colours to a point
like the steps of a Ziggurat, a wonder
rising high above the elephant graveyard —

Warren Mortimer holds a Creative Writing PhD at Lancaster University. In 2023, Warren’s poem Forgive me, Augustine, placed first for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. Warren is author of the pamphlet Fruit Knife Autopsy with Green Bottle Press. To date, Warren has been published by poetry magazines including Acumen, The Moth, Magma, Orbis, Poetry Ireland, and Stand. Warren is also lead editor to the Bloomsbury title Digressions in Deep Time: Ecocritical Approaches to Literature and the Arts.

Warren wrote the following about his poem:

Having written more than enough depressing poems in my teens and twenties, what I’m interested in is how to approach warmth and sentiment while still being interesting. I like poems which knit together various ideas that really have no right to exist in the same world —Wacky Warehouses, Ancient Egypt, Elmer, Mesopotamia — so the poem feels like a car-boot sale of memories. I was aware this might be a lot for the reader to juggle with, so strictly allowed myself just three lines to describe each world before hopping to the next one. But at the centre of all this colourful chaos is my daughter — and isn’t this exactly how kids take in the vastness of experience?