������̳

IMTIAZ DHARKER:The ������̳ asked me to write a poem about Hull and the joined up dance company have set that to dance but I wanted to read you some of that poem today because it's really your poem. It's called "This Tide of Humber".

"This tide of Humber. If you come to the edge of the world you need to be able to throw away the part of your ticket that says return along with the plans you made and the life you once had. They will say you went somewhere - who knows where - and stayed. If you have strayed to this end of the world It's not because you've been here before or come back to the door of a lover. You've never sat here together.

Never sipped wine or held hands on that bench or kissed by this river. You have no history with Hull, this tide of Humber but you know the vast grief of the sky. The scavenger's hunger, its insatiable cry. If you've come to write the hurt out of your heart, to take the ache and heal it with words, leave now

No scrabbling in dead poet's bins can turn gone into come or become. Come with a stranger's heart. Wiped clean. To a city that hangs on the sea by a hook. Holds on hard to the edge of luck and luck could be just a fingernail or a sail or a book. The swish of turbines turning in rain.

Its hiss on pavements. Its shimmer, drop, dropped like a plumb line down through layers underground. The slip of mud, the slap of the sea. If you come here, you see that the mud is a person washed up on the shore. A body, smoothed and shaped. Stroked from calf to thigh to nape. The taker and giver make themselves up out of each other.

Water fingers linger in the deepest folds. Limbs open and closed back into the river. An arm or a leg or a hip, heave out from under the sheet. The lifted mud is only a hint of the lost land beneath. Between the shorelines that yearn for each other. Water and mud, mud and water.

Intricate lovers. You stand here and hope that a hand will lift out of a wave. Wave to you from that weather drowned land. Even your stranger's feet remember pacing the ground under the water. The tracks of women and men crossing, crisscrossing after ice and drought. Through storm and calm, hunting the sun and rain, scents on the wind.

You were never looking for ghosts but they find you here. Voices sing through the tide. The rustling, the breathing, the music of travellers takes you out where the land would have been. Walked away, walked over, washed away, rolled in. And there, the ghost hulls of the trawlers nudge out of the dark with the trawler men who never came back.

Hauling their own white wake and their catch. The fish crying silver in nets made of air. If you come to the end of the world it stings like the edge of a blade. The verge of a cut but the cut is a freedom, a severed rope. Freed men and women rise up and walk out of the water and you go with them.

Past the docks, past terraces and tannerys with a crowd that grows in every lane that dares to look down on a king swings up Hessle Road along the boulevard, the avenue and Terry Street. Past the minster and fish market to the deep. Through a city bombed and bruised, razed flat, raised up again.

It spreads a grey wing, leads you to the smallest window you have ever seen. And through it shows you all the world, takes your food, makes it a feast. Holds your strangers body, folds it in arms of mud and the gulls walk over your heart over and over, return, repeat on hieroglyph feet. Their tracks, a braille of messages delivered from half built edges.

The water seeps over the drowned land to the lip of the city. It holds its breath. The women stop their washing, their stirring, their kneading and pounding to listen Between the widowed face of the sky and the ringed eye of a gull everything changes scale. A blade of grass is a turbine wing that lifts to the light as a fish gleams under the blade of an oar.

Like a shoulder blade, kissed by the moon. And the land wears the water like a shining veil. And the water bears the moon like a sacred jewel and the heart is a fish and luck is the hook that flicks it up between water and land, between Humber and Hull and holds it there, at the edge of the world."

Thank you. Thank you.