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Poem of the Week: ‘This Poem’ by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

25 August 2025

Our Poem of the Week is ‘This Poem’ by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, from her collection Quiet.

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’.

Somewhere beneath this poem is the one you sat down to write. Locked into the hold of it, or running shaded, through the leaves of this book is the poem that escaped untouched by hands that know no tenderness. This poem is not that poem. Not the one you travelled for. This poem is this poem, you concede, the one that took your hand instead. & being here now, having journeyed already so far you sit down with this poem to talk. & you are silent as you listen to the stories it speaks of, which are not yours though you are in them, though they contain you all the same. & when you write that other poem, the one you promised to meet, still you hear this one’s cruel whisperings as it floats in the air, as it lights on the shelf & waits there, watching, rubbing its hands like a fly

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’.

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