FABER POETRY SUBSCRIPTION NOW AVAILABLE
https://www.faber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Letterbox-POEM-journal-banner-1920x613.jpg https://www.faber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Medium-POEM-journal-banner-990x594.jpg https://www.faber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Mobile-POEM-journal-banner-640x460.jpg

Poem of the Week: from ‘Of the Snail & its Loveliness’ by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

28 May 2025

This week, our Faber Poem of the Week is an extract from ‘Of the Snail & its Loveliness’, which comes from Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut poetry collection, Quiet.

from Of the Snail & its Loveliness

 

3. Let me sing of the snail   & its loveliness, of the beauty I have ruined underfoot,     wincing as though the pain were entirely mine.     Knowing I could walk this city in a fatal rush   I have learned to step aside for you. Have crouched, even, in the rain     to move you further along your way in the line of your direction.     & what is care but this: to hold that which comes too soon to harm     & set it on a safer path. To say I’m sorry, simply –     to do this, & not dance. To signal the way to that place     where the skin meets itself again or failing that, where honey     fills the wound’s red mouth; solders a space left empty       of love. Love, this way, we might say,     this way, holding, sometimes, the other     sometimes the lonely self until it can be said, love,     we are home now.

 

Copyright © Victoria Adukwei Bulley, 2022. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.
Buy the Book
Quiet
Quiet
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
£12.99
£10.99

Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut poetry collection, Quiet, circles around ideas of black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, playing at the the tensions between the impulse to guard one’s ‘inner life’ and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, ‘your silence will not protect you’.

Add to Basket