for Rudolphe Douala Manga Bellfor Bell 

Daughter countries are posed on a map 
their borders ruler-straight. 

A native tongue is in a mother’s gift.
One sense of the word “gift” in German 

is contagion. In the aftermath of empires
language is a broken promise —

the past, a looted house
where the gate hangs loose. 

Beneath crowded trees, apples rot.
And yet, below the graft lines 

new growth lurches,
scion wood flourishes. 

How to wipe clean the axe 
after the edge cuts through? 

Some branches are reverting to type. 
After slash burning, a host of coppice shoots 

rallies from the trunks. The unsung 
is always trying to have the last word.

by Clementine E Burnley

This week’s poem is the first of three from new pamphlets being published by the Poetry Centre’s own ignitionpress. The pamphlets, by Clementine E Burnley, Fahad Al-Amoudi, and Laboni Islam, are being launched online on Saturday 12 August and everyone is welcome to attend the event! Please register for the launch via Zoom.

‘Protectorates’ is copyright © Clementine E Burnley, and is reprinted here from Radical Pairings (ignitionpress, 2023) by permission of ignitionpress.

Kinship, soil, belonging and displacement – these far-ranging poems pulse to the heartbeats of personal and historical moments from the African diaspora. Here memory and place enmesh. The quantum effects that guide migrating birds, an unnamed girl, a royal pearl and a brutalised immigrant co-exist alongside the joy and longing of family ties. In her debut pamphlet, this profound and compassionate poet creates a new space alive with songs for the unsung.

Clementine E Burnley is a Cameroon-born British writer who lives in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Emma Press’ Anthology of Britain, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. She’s an alumnus of Obsidian Foundation, Purple Hibiscus Workshop, and an Edwin Morgan Grantee.

Established in 2017, ignitionpress is an award-winning poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received four Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections and the press won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in 2021.

You can find out more about ignitionpress on the Poetry Centre website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.