Author: Taya King
Doug – Edinburgh:
Taya – London:
Darren – Paris:
Daina – Chicago:
Poem and collages by La Sirena featuring in the fifth issue of Surrealerpool’s magazine, ’Patastrophe! (27 May 2022).
https://surrealerpool.home.blog/patastrophe-no-5/
‘How Much Longer?’
The torn map reveals the ghosts of the city
Dreams of protesting with the Russian pacifists
Pleased with war’s dreadful and tumultuous roar
The locomotive has taken them nowhere
Roll the dice and take your turn
The sunflower smiles through the blood of the rubble to greet the new day
He who cannot play chess only uses brutality
Butterfly children slaughtered by noblemen in the city
Sugar the petrol, sell your guns and hide
The children roar in wild tears until they cry themselves to sleep
Ghosts should rise up to drag the warmonger to hell!
The desert queen serves the mad king
The mad king is distended
Avenging strife embitters human life
What is invisible will light up the sky in incandescent colours
The doll child hides in East Budleigh
Ivan Bilibin and Pushkin should curse the mad king to hell
A chorus of war cries from behind keyboards far from harm
The alchemy of dreaming heals the broken hearts
Screams and curses across myriad media apps
Karkhiv can never sleep, can only dream of peace, can only endure in the hearts and minds of those who will carry hope to the highest mountains for all to see
A half-hearted re-enactment of old mistakes, but with real deaths
Extra points for the grim reaper for taking the mad king
Workers and refugees captured and tortured in a celluloid prison
The young woman took her revolver to bed and was prepared to use it
Inferno awaits the mad king
The boys in the field are bored, or afraid or just excited by the game
My son is missing an eye and my mother’s wing has been ripped
Dante should pull him down there
Inevitable as a pub brawl at closing time, last orders called
The imaginary letter, Z, doesn’t exist in Russian. Neither should the mad king
The inferno takes them all to his heart until they march to the beat of the war drums, the death drums, the holocaust drums
No one is leaving until we find out who really started it
Every embrace is a sign of hope, of defiance
Where are the angels now?
The wind blows the shards of the silent mirrors across their broken faces and captures their death throes for all to see
A world left blind and toothless by the law of revenge
We suffocated on steam that turned into locks of human hair
The mad king of antiquity belongs in the past, not now
We run and burn and fall and run over and over again
And midnight trembled to see such terrors
The fighting leaves old men deformed in the streets
May Baba Yaga escort the mad king to hell
A stain upon another generation, damned to repeat the whims of their rabid masters
All of this just to reset the board for the next time
Blood stained the monochrome city of ashes
We, the invisible demand to be heard even if we cannot be seen
May the liar choke on his lies
She hung up the remnants of shame like a ventriloquist’s flag for all to see
Criminals jostle to steal the clothes and words of the famous dead
The mad king is fragile, just like a chess king. And like a chess king, I want to throw him to the ground
The war is fought by actors and actresses, not by women and children
Who pays the price?
We bleed
Spent
How much longer?
Collective poem by Doug Campbell, Taya King, Daina Kopp and Darren Thomas
Darren and I recently took a trip to Battlesbridge – an historic village in Essex that is famous for its Victorian mill, which has since been converted into an antiques centre. The former mill houses many antique collectibles, as well an extensive selection of craft materials that are perfect for collaging. Among them, we discovered the below siren statue.
Our global network of researchers at lasirenasurrealistgroup@gmail.com are dedicated to finding sirens all over the world. Can you help them in their mission to uncover the secrets of the sirens?
Our dear friend and regular contributor to the blog, John Richardson, recently went siren spotting in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and kindly shared this report with us: “Wandering through Stamford we spotted this…..We liked the image and the play on words which it suggested to us…”. The results of this fruitful excursion are displayed below.
As always, we urge siren spotters everywhere to continue sharing their research findings with us at lasirenasurrealistgroup@gmail.com.
The below exquisite corpse features on the front cover of the International Exhibition of Surrealism Part One: Cairo 2022 Poetic and Critical Anthology, which was collectively produced by the members of La Sirena Surrealist Group.
Taya: The international spirit of the Surrealist Exhibition in Cairo is reflected here in the hybrid union of the creature’s three culturally distinct heads, including (from left to right) that of a Moai statue from Easter Island, an ancient Greek sculpture from the Classical period and an ancient Egyptian mummy from the host country, all of which were sourced from Harter’s Picture Archive for Collage and Illustration.
Darren: I sourced the torso from an old favourite of mine – Heck’s Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science, from the section on anatomical bodies. I was struck by the positioning of the arms, which I read as a welcoming gesture and immediately brought back fond memories of how I felt when I was in Cairo amongst my surrealist comrades, who embraced La Sirena with open arms. I cannot think of a more fitting gesture to grace the cover of the anthology for the International Exhibition of Surrealism, with its emphasis on internationalism, open to all.
The butterfly wings were taken from another of my favourite books: The Observer Book of Butterflies. I am constantly drawn to butterflies because of their association with flight, freedom, transformation, rebirth and hope, and, again, these associations were wedded to my experiences of flying to Cairo and being part of the exhibition, which was truly transformative.
Daina: I’ve always been fond of bestiaries and fantastical creatures like those imagined by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516), Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525? – 1569) and J J Grandville (1803 – 1847). I love medieval bestiaries and pull a lot of inspiration for my work from such books.
The hips came from an image of, Pan, the Greek god of Shepards and the mountain wilds. The tail came from an engraving, DRAGON, 1640. Draco Aethiopicus. Woodcut from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s ‘Serpentum et Draconium Historiae’, Bologna, Italy, 1640.
I can’t recall where the image of Pan came from exactly. It might have been from the book Treasury of Fantastical and Mythological Creatures: 1087 Renderings from Historical Sources by Richard Huber.
Doug: For the legs, I used a reversed stock image of a knight in full body armour.
This turns out to be a 16th century wood engraving by Vecellio Cesare, a cousin of Titian! The metal ‘scales’ on the legs made me think of birds and reptiles, so I found textbook engravings of chicken feet and added them on.
We would like to thank our dear friend, Christine Haller – whom we had the pleasure of meeting at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo – for sending us an image of an Egyptian siren, along with the following caption: “As I noticed, you collect images of sirens, and I would love to share a photo of a gorgeous one that I encountered during a visit at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is part of an Egyptian object which shows many other fantastic creatures”.
Both the siren and the mystery object it inhabits are not accompanied with a description and we would be most grateful to learn more about them. Thus, should you uncover any of their secrets, please alert our research team at lasirenasurrealistgroup@gmail.com, where we can categorise the object and continue to curate an international database of sirens.
La Sirena 