the journey there started wednesday night with a bus from lewisham, where i had looked after the kids until 11-ish p m when their mother came home from work. 2 buses later i arrived at heathrow terminal 5 at just after 2 a m. a bit after 8 we we took off & landed at kiev boryspil at 13.30 ukrainian time (2 hours ahead of uk time) where i was met by valentina & soon we met up with gunnar harding & marie tonkin who had flown in from stockholm. once we got to kiev we quickly changed money & bought something to eat. as we were jogging to catch the train to poltava i realised someone had opened both pockets of my backpack. i didn’t think too much about it at the time but qiuckly closed the backpack in mid-stride (the rest of that story became a poem). 4 & a half hours later we were in poltava. the hotel they housed us in, aristocrat, was fairly magnificent, a single room that reminded me most of all of a decent sized english one bedroom flat. all of us who were present (the ones flying in from malmö & prague arrived later that evening) went off for pizza & beer. & that was that thursday
Notes on Poltava
late monday night i came back from poltava where i participated in the meridian poltava international festival of poetry as the full name of the event is. as i just took photos of poltava, all photos are used with permission
