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[vc_column_text el_class=”event-header”]Alight by Stephen Seabridge #LightNightSOT
[/vc_column_text] [/vc_column_inner] [/vc_row_inner][/vc_column] [/vc_row][vc_row content_placement=”middle”] [vc_column el_class=”remove-all-spacing”][vc_row_inner content_placement=”middle” equal_height=”yes” el_class=”remove-all-spacing event-border-bottom”] [vc_column_inner width=”2/3″ el_class=”event-standard-padding”] [vc_column_text el_class=”link-left link-dark”]How to get there [/vc_column_text] [vc_column_text el_class=”link-left link-dark”]Back to What’s On [/vc_column_text] [/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″ el_class=”event-standard-padding”] [vc_column_text el_class=”social-padding-top”][/vc_column_text] [/vc_column_inner] [/vc_row_inner][/vc_column] [/vc_row]Alight by Stephen Seabridge #LightNightSOT
The very first Stoke-on-Trent Poet Laureate (2018-20), Stephen Seabridge has been commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council to write a new poem especially for Light Night Stoke-on-Trent: Alight.
Hear Alight during your walk through The Fiery Promenade.
A glow piercing the darkness in the green woodlands
before Stoke became a place straddling the Trent,
firelight deterring wolves wary of human shapes.
Other lights from torches carried along the old pathways
where Romans would come to build their roads,
spread the blaze of the continent like fire through grass.
More when the moonlight bore down on the morning
when they dug up the fresh patch of clay, before sunrise,
marvelling at the slip of its orange flesh in their hands
growing brighter and richer in colour as the sun
emerged from the dark blanket of the horizon,
its risen beam one with the portrait of a mackerel sky.
The sun again, this time blotted out by the smoke,
by blackness, by greyness, by a plume becoming smog
until ground began to merge with the sky above,
while the hot flares of industry roared their fire
in the bellies of the bottle ovens, kilns, ready to devour
the men, their flesh, the strength of their lungs.
Lights in the lanterns when the Chartist Potters revolted,
lights in the lamps when the miners decided to strike,
lights out when they sealed the caps of those mines forever.
The Potteries, alight with colour and sonic booms
on the night of the Millennium, fireworks too in each park
of the towns, lighting them up in smoke and supernova.
And now, a garden aflame, the monuments to our past
recast in yellow beams of sun-spell and neon, these lights
so bright they are outside of seeing, outside of time,
a blazing as vivid as the sun burning out in the dark,
casting the mysteries of their old shadows aside,
bathing all in their path with the heat of their glow.
Alight is presented as part of Light Night Stoke-on-Trent.
Match funded by Arts Council England and Stoke-on-Trent City Council and delivered by Appetite in partnership with Stoke-on-Trent City Council and the Cultural Forum, find out more about Light Night Stoke-on-Trent and plan your visit here.
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