SLAM! You're Gonna Wanna Hear This by Nikita Gill

Author:Nikita Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

by Raymond Antrobus

This is a poem I wrote after coming across a statistic that estimated 70 per cent of people born profoundly deaf in the UK grow up illiterate. I was teaching in a Hackney school at the time and quickly switched to working in deaf education. My first residency at a deaf school was in the same school I’d attended as a student in London. I recognized some of the struggles that young deaf people are still facing today and this poem is a response.

I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits,

a solar system where the space between

a star and a planet isn’t empty. I have left

a white beard of noise in my place and many

of you won’t know the difference. We are

indeed the same volume, all of us eventually fade.

I have left Earth in search of an audible God.

I do not trust the sound of yours.

You would not recognise my grandmother’s Hallelujah

if she had to sign it, you would have made her sit

on her hands and put a ruler in her mouth

as if measuring her distance from holy.

Take your God back, though his songs

are beautiful, they are not loud enough.

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