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KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
KJUB
Phoebe Eustance Jamie Leatherbarrow
Reconnect our land to our people, paint us anew and form a sculpture of our confusion.
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
Take our history, put down the past, forget the future and do all that you can to just be here. Amongst the forgetting, the faceless, the new, find a place.
Language was our message, voice, lifeblood. To kill our words is to destroy a people. This is why we fought, Ludovit, Pavel, others too.
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
What we saw, we felt and spoke and we wrote. We wrote in our language, and by this we are preserved. Poetry formed a palace, a home and a kingdom.
A free democracy living within the leaves of our books, and though they tore pages and cracked spines, they could not cut out our tongues.
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
In the dark emptiness of exile, language built an embassy of self. Come; validate your papers and rest awhile amongst my words.
We are the last survivors, the ones who have been on both sides, who have stared into the face of the future and dreamt that one day we could feel it for ourselves. Once more we stand poised at the gates of change.
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
In Bratislava they’re selling faces for gold but here amongst the mountains, under incandescent skies, a crippled culture refuses to die. The young try to bury it beneath the streets, but there is an identity here to be discovered.
In the rubble of our best intentions, the children play at forgetting their history. We are new, newly European and glad of new beginnings but at what cost does this come?
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
We kept hope that one day we would be free. Not just free but recognised, realised with an identity of our own. But when I look for this place now I am left reeling amongst clanging echoes in the cavernous, vacant halls. Against the dull shell of consciousness I feel new sounds, unknown and alien, lacerate me again and again and again.
I stare into the cloudy waters, picking reflections from the surface, guessing at the faceless owners. Sitting by myself. I begin to question not just my memories, but my tired old convictions.
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
I could mourn the passing of my identity, the ignorance of my being but even though I may be lost, I still am. If you choose to listen, I can meet you here. My words bear me out into the void.
Magda’s Honeymoon
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
I
saw these buildings go up. I was born in 1942 when a war was raging and another was about to begin, and all around me the world was ringing with why and with what next. In 1968, when the Red Army rolled into Praha, I was not home. I was on my honeymoon. It was a happy week, in Romania. Back across the border I came in time to see the troops enter Zvolen. No bare chested, flag waving Bratislavan show of resistance; just a local man, angry, drunk and staggering towards the monster heaving and belching in the middle of our road; “We do not want you here!” he said, but sluggishly they kept on coming. Then, drink-sodden and reeling, he fell, and landed perfectly, terribly in exactly the right spot. They did not stop, and this is my recollection of the Prague Spring; a man’s skull slowly pulverised by the tracks of a T-10 tank. I heard nothing over the grunt of the engine, but for days the pulp squelching out from the hollow of his head, carelessly painted across the cracked concrete— a filthy daub of grey and muddy red— was all that I could see. They came to silence us, but I can still hear the slowly screaming echoes of this desperate memory. It clings to me as if it were happening again today.
Phoebe Eustance www.phoebeeustance.com
Jamie Leatherbarrow jw.leatherbarrow@gmail.com
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
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KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
KJUB - P Eustance J Leatherbarrow
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