Issue 35: Naomi Foyle

The Knowledge 

‘We are an endowment,’ she said. ‘We have so much money

it will never run out. We work with marginal and disadvantaged communities

and want to ask: what would the world look like

if we met each other, not out of fear or the desire for profit,

but in the full awareness of our mutual dependence? This is not

a new idea, of course: we know many people are already living

this way, so we want to find them and ask about their knowledge:

how it sustains them, evolves, is disseminated. In this way, we seek

to learn how to translate a person’s knowledge of what it means

to be socially excluded into a world that values everyone equally.

What, we wish to discover, is the role of knowledge

in creating such change?’  

                                                And though I offer a partial answer

to her question all I really must do now is describe the world, just

as it is: a shining copper table in the pub by the Thames, surrounded

by mature women young enough to be my daughters, who can all

mend flat tyres, speak in tongues beyond English, afford to live

in the most expensive city in Europe. One plans to build a bicycle

out of bamboo grown in Cornwall. One was arrested four times for

sabotaging power stations and, identified by her ‘distinctive mouth’,

banned from Edinburgh. One slammed shut the gates of Utopia

Festival against a stampede of drug dealers. One has walked

the old Jerusalem to Jericho Road, both sides of the wall

that severs it.

                                                                                      Outside, the moon shines

  with a nuclear brilliance, as if the sun had improbably imploded

and soon the only light on this dumbfounded planet will come from us:

our fluorescent tubes, neon scrawls, flouncy strings of diode pearls

      we cast from banks of bankers, millstones, coppers, spies

        over war-green waters                 commuter currents          

                      to drift like dimming eyes into the silt        

     of muddy mittens       unlucky pennies         jellied flesh

                       of those who chose             to slip the net

Naomi Foyle is a British-Canadian poet, science fiction novelist, dramatist and essayist. Her many poetry publications include The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 PBS Recommendation; the pamphlet Red Hot & Bothered, winner of the 2008 Apples & Snakes ‘The Book Bites Back’ competition; the transatlantic Adamantine (US/UK, 2019); Importents (2021) a polemical pamphlet; and Salt & Snow (2025), a triptych of individual and collective elegies. Her frequent collaborations include two filmpoems from Salt & Snow with Wendy Pye and Razia Aziz, and ASTRA, her adaptation of her science fantasy quartet The Gaia Chronicles, which won the 2022 Brighton Fringe ONCA Green Curtain Award. Foyle is Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester, and Poetry and Fiction Editor of the journals Critical Muslim and Gramarye. Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, Arabic, Ukrainian and Portuguese, and she has read her work in Europe, North America, Palestine and Iraq.

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