ToddDragon Collaborations: Summer Poetry

Hello Everyone!

Today I’m doing something a little different…

If you follow my book blog: books.samanthadrage.co.uk then you’ll probably have seen my collaboration series with my good friend Charlie. For those of you who haven’t, ToddDragon Collaborations are posts that we try and do roughly ever 2 months about anything we find interesting really. Books have been our main focus so far, but this time we decided to do a poetry theme collab, which is why I’m posting it on this blog instead.

If you’ve read our other collab posts then you’ll know that we did a bookish photography challenge a few months ago, which we both enjoyed immensly, so we decided to do similar thing, but with poetry.

Both Charlie and I are poets and of course I’m a photographer too, so blending these two together sounded like a lot of fun. We both chose 2 prompts based around the idea of ‘summer’ and wrote poems based on the 4 prompts we came up with together, which were:

• Yellow
• Pride
• Ocean
• Memories

Once we’d both written our poems we swapped them. The challenge then was to take 1 photo based on each poem the other had written. I am going to be sharing Charlie’s poems and the photos that I took based on them, so if you want to read my poems and see the photos Charlie took for them you’ll have to go and check out his blog here: https://halfhidecharlie6.wixsite.com/charlietodd

So let’s just get into them…

Yellow

your heart is not made of gold

gold is hard
gold does not pulsate and beat
gold does not hold, treasure and keep

your heart is yellow

sun shining
light brightly burning
always smiling at me

your heart is yellow
and twice as priceless as gold

Memories

found in: the garden
ice lollies colour our tongues red
(sticky fingers too)
mum turns up Morissette and
gets the camera out again

Pride

whether you find your family beneath a flag
or elsewhere under the wide umbrella
your people will be here for summer weather
and you will feel something of a wholeness –
liberté, égalité, fraternité
– you will find it there together

Ocean

hands pouring over sands searching
the little pieces of translucent gold
with someone singing ‘just you wait,
just you wait’

we find what we’re looking for
the dulled glass as common as dirt
but more beautiful to us than any
diamonds are

it’s colder than it was last year
and lonelier too because I miss
the company we kept and all
love we share

the waves came and went
the waves came and went
the waves came and went
we stayed

yeah, I want to be back there

I adore Charlie’s poems and I hope that my photos did them some justice. I had a lot of ideas for the photos, but I was limited by the resources I had and my photoshop skills are perhaps not quite up to scratch. I think the ‘Yellow’ photo would have looked so much better if I’d been able to actually hold the heart rather than editing it in, but believe it or not human hearts aren’t just sold at your local supermarket!

I think my favourite image I took was the memories one because it was a little more inside my comfort zone, which means I was able to do a better job at it. Ocean was difficult for me since I live about as far inland in England as you can get, but I brought that on myself really since I was the one that chose ‘Ocean’ as a prompt – I truly don’t know what I was thinking!

Either way though, I’m proud of the images I’ve created and even more proud of the poems I wrote. If you want to read my poems, then you’ll have to head over the Charlie’s blog and while you’re there you can have a look at the photos he took too! I’ll be heading over there too to have a look since we like to wait and see what the other has done when the post goes live, so I’ll see you there!

Goodbye for now!

Over and Out