A Silent War - Raised (B.S.L.)

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Details

Location

Belfast, University of Atypical

Year

2021

Date

Length

03min 08sec

Audio

silent

Format

Digital

colour

Source

Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive

Courtesy

Hands That Sign, Paula Clarke, Ross Thompson

Rights Holder

Northern Ireland Screen, Ross Thompson

It is illegal to download, copy, print or otherwise utilise in any other form this material, without written consent from the copyright holder.

Description

Raised by Ross Thompson, written in Bangor during 2020 Lockdown

With your hands dusted as if from reading
tombstones, you lift the dough, warm as laundered
sheets from beneath a towel, and start kneading, 
both heels stretching and pushing to conjure

a stonewashed boulder pillowy to touch
and brewery sweet with scent of soda
and buttermilk. By memory, you tuck
and crimp, inhaling heady aroma

of your mother’s kitchen. Your own songbird, 
dimpled fingers replicas of your own,
mimics your movements. A rising sonder 
briefly flutters your eyelids like the clothes

drying on the line on this warmest month
on record but you blink away the tears,
gently tend the bread and tell her that once,
in the good years before war and the fear

of a wicked disease made us brittle 
and prone to weepy silliness, distant
relatives baked these farls on a griddle 
with ground flour and homegrown ingredients

beneath a chimney swept clean by a goose 
on a string. She yawns and says she was taught 
this in school, and taps her cup for more juice,
leaving snowy ghost prints around the top.

Credits

Raised by Ross Thompson
BSL translation and performance by Paula Clarke
Filmed in University of Atypical by Stuart Calvin
A Silent War Creative Producers: Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell & Ann Donnelly
Funded by the Department for Communities through Northern Ireland Screen

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