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Poem by Adham Smart

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Adham Smart (pictured unseasonably with snowman) this Halloween Friday (the poem does have a pumpkin in it, so some seasonal tie-in occurs). Smart is, according to his own bio note, "an Anglo-Egyptian boy in his first year of Sixthform" who lives in Southeast London. He first became known as a young poet of much promise after winning the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2006.

Smart has been published in a handful of places, including a poem in The Rialto, short stories for The Cadaverine and a digital chapbook on the Mimesis website, and was recently selected for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2008. He also helps to run the online youth poetry magazine Pomegranate. Get Smart, as it were - he's one to watch.


Pumpkin Heart Boy

A lovester after his own fashion, he took her
hand and held it in his. Oh, was he a wonder-
kid, his hair in tufts and sweeping waves
like dolphins surfacing in a line. Golden-eyed,
he licked her lips with hand on thigh,
and stroked that pillar of bone and skin,
told her that she was more than meat to him.
His pumpkin heart, more than a muscle,
drummed and drummed and drummed and
drummed the boy and girl into the heat
of being loved and not being meat.
A sweetened lifting of his senses
drove to dreams of burning clouds. It was
the longest time they’d felt the breath
of this pumpkin-life, that never-death.


poem by Adham Smart

Comments

Dave King said…
Very frsh and strong, and with enough reality and enough magic to grip and make me want to come back - and probably back and back.
Anonymous said…
One of the best young poets around at the moment. Good poem and a fine choice.

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