The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For September, we are delighted to publish three new works by Chrissie Gittins. The first of these, ‘The Islands of the Bahamas’, is published today with more poems to follow throughout the month.

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The Islands of the Bahamas

 

Saved from her kitchen my mother’s tray is black

with gold islands scattered like worm casts

across its shiny surface –

Ragged Island, Samana, Cay Verde.

 

They’re squashed together to fit the space,

the compass point’s due north veers west.

 

A plane flies in from the east,

an ocean liner forms a horizon,

a bather in a bikini arches her back,

shoals of fish jump over the rippling ocean.

 

I imagine her savouring the words – The Bahamas –

a place she’d never go,

 

though she felt their warmth,

waved along with the palm trees.

Instead she made it to farmhouses in West Wales,

hotels in the former Yugoslavia,

 

a camp site on the French Atlantic coast.

Each morning it’s where I assemble breakfast –

 

a mug sits on Mayaguana, a teapot on Andros.

We eat together, spot Ernest Hemmingway

landing a marlin in The Biminis,

watch George Clooney swim across Romora Bay.

 

We push our toes into the powder at Pink Sand Beach,

eat baked crab and rock lobster,

 

drink strawberry daiquiris to the clanking of rigging.

The green turtles of Conception Island swim with us,

breaking the water’s surface for air

with their crazy-paved heads.

 

Every sunrise is unbelievable.

 

Chrissie Gittins writes poetry, poetry for children, short stories and radio drama. She has published three poetry pamphlets and three collections – Armature (Arc), I’ll Dress One Night As You (Salt) and Sharp Hills (Indigo Dreams). She appeared on BBC Countryfile with her fifth children’s poetry collection, Adder Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books). She has received two Arts Council grants and an Author’s Foundation award; she features on the Poetry Archive and is a Hawthornden Fellow. Chrissie has read her poems on BBCR4, at the Royal Festival Hall, the StAnza, Aldeburgh, Ledbury and Shetland festivals, and at the British Council Bangkok and at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York. Her recent poems are published in the anthologies Women On Nature (Unbound), Wonder (Natural History Museum/Macmillan), A Poet for Every Day of The Year (Macmillan), Empty Nest (Picador), and Night Feeds and Morning Songs (Trapeze), and in publications including Bad Lilies, Perverse, Magma and Poetry Salzburg Review. She has also published two short story collections and had four plays produced on BBCR4.