Poetry: Kitchen Sill Radio by Tamara von Werthern

 

Kitchen Sill Radio

 

In the kitchen on the window sill

There’s a small retro style radio

It was meant to keep us company

While doing the dishes and cooking

 

Now it no longer provides comfort

Sparking spontaneous shuffle dances

Across the tiles, with a cooking spoon microphone

It says one word again and again

 

And each time it’s like a small hard pebble

Sinking further down into my soft insides.

It’s a new word, which we never heard before

And now it’s everywhere – a constant

 

It triggers thoughts of the apocalypse

Of how fragile the walls of our home are

How porous and insufficient

And how the world outside keeps changing

 

Day after day – of how everything that seemed

A certainty is in flux and like slipping sand

The world will have been remoulded

When we finally step outside again

 

Tamara von Werthern is an award-winning playwright based in Hackney.

You can read more about the success of her dystopian short film, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, here.

Her play The White Bike, and climate change book Letters to the Earth, featuring her contribution, are available at Pages of Hackney bookshop on Lower Clapton Road, which is currently closed but still selling book tokens.