Photographer and designer Pete Denton proposed this interesting picture, taken in Marrakech, for our January 2020 Team-Screen Poem. The image captures a man and his film projector, in Cinema Eden, the oldest Moroccan Cinema, shortly before it was replaced by a modern picture house. The picture was part of a collection integrated in a photo essay by Pete Denton.

Members of the public participating in our January event built a collective poem using their mobile phones and the free-of-charge Menti app.

The poem, below, has been edited by Antonio Martínez Arboleda, poet and organiser of Transforming with Poetry.

At the end of this post you can see the image of the poem in its raw collective state at the end of the session. With thanks to Pete Denton and to all poets and readers involved.

 

Our eyes

 

I am just a hand-cranked camera

now covered in dust.

 

Overhead pipes

held together with tape

 

What whimsical image will come

while I wait for the whirring?

 

Through the lens of my old, antique eye

I see the world move on,

advancing without me

spinning over and over

sharing jerky pictures

of faces I will remember:

a tile-patterned floor,

disintegrated at the edges

 

Marylin Monroe

Bette Davies

John Wayne

Take your pick

 

Old films, new faces

 

Yousef Chahine,

Um Kulthum

Omar Shariff,

They all played here.

 

And as Dorothy was led to OZ

by a road of yellow brick,

so are we led to the unknown

by endless ways of geometry.

 

Flawed and warm

replaced by colder flawless

 

As we whither away,

Our legacy becomes despair.

 

I can see the stories of humanity

in your sad eyes.

 

I can see the world

in our eyes.