Cathy Dreyer is an aspiring poet on the M Phil in Creative Writing at the University of South Wales. In 2013, her blog about walking and writing was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings https://walkinginacircle.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/walk-no-192/ She has been published in VerseKraken, Bare Fiction, Paris Lit Up and on fakepoems.tumblr.com
Cathy’s libretto of a piano transcription of ‘I Roam These Meadows (Elizabeth’s Aria)’, a piece written from September 2014 – January 2015 and composed by Harriet Grainger, was performed in the Richard Burton Theatre at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama by Music Theatre Wales and soprano Jennifer France. This was part of Music Theatre Wales’ 2015 Make an Aria Project in partnership with St Fagans National History Museum and RWCMD.
Cathy came third in the Wenlock Poetry Competition recently and was longlisted in the MsLexia poetry competition. Her long term mission is to change the world!
What we can see
Found in an online, for-comment draft of Visual Worlds by Erna Fiorentini and James Elkins, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2016. ‘What we can see’ was placed third in the 2014 Wenlock Poetry Competition
Between direct combat and wireless
control is the wire-guided missile,
which unspools fibre-optic cable
thinner than fishing line as it flies.
The operator guides the missile
to its target by watching silent video
feed from a camera in the nose
of the missile. The enhanced fibre-optic
guided missile launched vertically,
paying out cable as it went. It was turned,
in flight, either manually or via several
waypoints, so that its path was not ballistic
and the operator could be safely hidden.
Live video feed, which is silent, from
non-line-of-sight missiles, and other guided
aircraft, produces historically unprecedented
experiences, in which operators have intimate
knowledge of events that are inaccessible
to them. The high-resolution, but silent,
full motion video feeds from the drones
allow crews to claim that they are not
thousands of miles from the war zone
but just eighteen inches away: the distance
from eye to screen. The sense of optical
proximity is palpable. Crews are often required
to track someone for weeks, even months:
“We see them playing with their dogs or doing laundry.
We know their patterns like our neighbours’ patterns.
We even go to their funerals.”
Move Along Now
by Cathy Dreyer
start from here, but here I am, I wouldn’t
from here, but here I am, I wouldn’t start
here, but here I am, I wouldn’t start from
but here I am, I wouldn’t start from here,
here I am, I wouldn’t start from here, but
I am, I wouldn’t start from here but here
am, I wouldn’t start from here, but here I
I wouldn’t start from here but here I am,
wouldn’t start from here, but here I am, I
Move Along Now first appeared on www.fakepoems.tumblr.com
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