Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor in Devon. In 2017 two pamphlets were published: A Sprig of Rowan by Three Drops Press and All the Time in the World by Cinnamon Press who published an earlier collection and two novels. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow. In 2018 she jointly won the Coast to Coast Pamphlet competition and has been awarded a writing residency at Brisons Veor.
www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
Mots
Sound artist: Eliza Lomas
We needed to name
what we hadn’t found words for…
wrote burnished brass, blood-vein, lead belle.
They came to us like missives from ourselves.
Their attraction to lights (mistaken for moon)
is what erased them
in their thousands
clouded magpie, lute string, hebrew character.
The smallest need a microscope
to tell them apart,
and can only be spoken of in Latin
cryptoblabes bistriga, phycita robrella.
Now that they’ve been pinned
to illustrations
we’ll maybe recall
the meanings of the old words
by the hieroglyphs on their wings
even as they vanish, year
by year, word by
word – engrailed, merveille du jour.
Rebecca Gethin
‘Mots’ is from Rebecca’s new collection Vanishings (Palewell Press, 2020).
