Kristina Cranfeld

A Curtained Room
Medium: poem
Year: 2024

I am in the academic hospital
001 is my residing ward
What do you say my illness is?
And where is my cohort?

There are no walls, there are no doors
Just curtained, narrow corridors
There sounds crawl from many sides
And whisper darkly, go and hide.

I try to speak, I can not hear
My voice in instant disappears
I try to sit, I try to stand
I try to run but simply can’t.

Behind the curtains, there is a light
Be ware of it, it's very bright
You walk into a curtained room
You will be punished there through.

And I am ill with this disease
It’s called tremendosilencepedimus
I must absorb all sounds here
Can't utter words till I expand.

And then I burst with cruel force
Rip ugly curtains, break all bulbs
Throw TV screens against the floors
And celebrate until night falls.

Cornea Reach
Medium: poem
Year: 2024

Cedar, Maple and Mulberry mansions
These properties are victims of mega expansions

Their soft and polished pastel pallet design
In this reality frankly indicate urban decline.

Their walls are bathed in thin, shallow waves
Of not so distantly stinking river Thames

And now these places of mega desire
With seasonal gadgets that quickly expire

And private signs and locks and high fences
Placed specially there to attracts stranger’s gazes

Privateness here is beyond common sense
I am deeply troubled, silent and tense

Where all the door numbers decided to vanish?
This is a way for a postman get punished.

The passage I took is neatly looked after
As if I walk the red carpet, receiving my Bafta

Too clean too pristine, too neat for my liking
I rather be covered with dirt, in the wild, mudlarking.

A Splinter
Medium: poem
Year: 2024

I stand on this land with my bare feet
I feel the warmness, dryness and sadness of it
I hear the prayer playing a far
This song travels through me, so familiar.

The sun shines gently on my pale face
For centuries I longed to be in this sacred place
The silent and dry hills as human shapes
Roll through distances, they rise and fail.

I stepped on a thorn, it hurts my foot
A splinter is inside, and I am pleased with it
When I will be away and once again forlorn
Not all will be immediately gone.

I will take the splinter out of my foot
And will store it in a jar to raise my mood
I will think of sky and sun and dust
And will return to sacred land at last.

Walk around Hackney
Medium: poem
Year: 2024

Grey steel and metal skies
Make my spirit unbearably dry
Bold flat colours blind my eyes
I look up to follow the skies.

Man altered nature is everywhere
Grey stones are neatly organised
Autumn trees whisper get out of there
You might get lost in this manufactured paradise.

These unforgivably open spaces
Leave no privacy for imagination
And if you want a little romance
Not this place, you have no chance.

Uniformed workers, in orange bright
Giving you directions, before you die.
Who designs these spaces, as if for a day?
People must live here for years, eat, make love and pray.

The air smells heavily of rubber
The edge of the earth is in close proximity
I climbed up the concrete ladder
To perceive this land limits.

Through Hackney’s bleak horizon
Whispers of subcultures arising
Graffiti on walls call for change
To liberate us from corporate chains.

Hackney marshes seen better days
But youths with guitars brightens the place
Poets, artist and Jamaican vibes
Will one day transform this mediocre place from decline.