My name is Podrigo Atuma. I write poems and a few years ago I sent some poems to a friend

of mine in England and asked him if he could give a read of them and give some feedback.

He wrote back saying, look, you've got a good eye for speech and for the emotional landscape

about what's going on. But what can you see? Where are these poems being situated? He said

to me that where they were being situated would be filled with information and with delight.

And also with pain and the history about what it's been like to be in that place, that places

and our relationship to them carry an enormous amount of information to be paid attention to.

Right now I'm standing by Jason Allen-Pasent. Right now I'm standing beneath what used to

be, I imagine, an impressive tree. Split down its bowl, it has sprouted green leaves that

will be rustling way into September. At its base lying a thwart the clearing is the

severed part. The colour of brown has weathered to near grey and the footfall of walkers has

covered the wood with a layer of dust and yet the part that has fallen among the spike

in our aden hungry shrubs surges out of death. The raspberries feed on its breath and beetles

thrive in the slurry middle where the bowl rots. Listen, there is nothing as exhilarating

as the feeling of life coming into you though people look suspiciously, stand and listen,

do not go anywhere. We have been the workers, just the workers. In the Congo one man had

a land almost 80 times the size of Belgium as his estate. We have been property. When

I talk about reclaiming time I'm just thinking about my body standing in the middle of this

woodland and doing nothing, nothing.

Jason Allen Paisant grew up in a place called Coffee Grove in Central Jamaica and his

grandmother who had raised him was a farmer. So trees were everywhere. In some essays

he writes about cedars and logwood and guano trees. And now he has moved to live in England

...