Memorabilia are not only objects, concert tickets, photographs, letters, keepsakes, but also fragments of memory, gestures, words, and feelings that we cling to, reimagine, or transform. For artists and creative thinkers, memorabilia often becomes raw material: the ephemera that bridges past and present, personal and collective history, lived experience and artistic practice.
In times of constant digital turnover, memorabilia challenges us to think about what we hold onto, what we archive, and how we reframe personal or cultural histories through creative practice. From nostalgia to critical reflection, from intimate souvenirs to ironic collectables, this theme opens a wide space for interpretation.
We have had a lot of submissions this month for our writers corner, a good mix of poems and text, We do hope you enjoy them.
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Our resident Poet Peter devonald has a fab selection of poems this month and he has been selcted to be a judge for https://www.whisperingwisdom.co.uk/competitions … you can find more of what he’s up to on our blog pages…
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Artist name - Lynn White
Website - https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com
Description
Beach Combings and The Vase are both about how objects can carry memories to another time.
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Artist name- Simon Williams
Instagram - @kormeleon
Description
Poem concerning the relics of a relationship
Relics
My T-shirt which you used to wear
On which
(I think)
your scent still lingers
Your belt you left behind
I sit here running through my fingers
The tape I borrowed from you
I can no longer bear to hear
These things still hold your memory
And serve to keep you near
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Artist name - Joshua Walker, The Last Bard
Instagram - @bigjosh84thelastbard
Description
My work explores memory, loss, and the artifacts we carry from the lives we inhabit and the lives we witness. I write from the perspective of The Last Bard, using myth, intimacy, and raw emotional truth to render objects, letters, photographs, and fragments of the world as relics. Each poem in this submission engages memorabilia—a dying god’s apology, a photograph of a young grandfather, a cigarette left by a lover—as vessels of memory, longing, and survival. My writing confronts absence and presence, fullness and emptiness, finding resonance in the tangible traces life leaves behind.
The Cigarette
Sometimes I press it in the dark,
as if rubbing the paper and ash could summon her smile,
the heat of her hand,
the truth of what I was never meant to possess.
It is tiny, fragile, unremarkable—
and yet it is everything:
an artifact of love lost,
a talisman of heartbreak,
proof that she lived,
proof that she belonged to someone else,
proof that some love leaves its fingerprints
on the smallest, most unlikely things.
She left with him.
No glance back. No word that could have saved me.
Her laughter hung in the air like smoke,
thick, curling, impossible to grasp.
Later, on the porch, I found it:
a cigarette butt, not my brand,
pressed into the ashtray like proof.
I picked it up.
Kept it.
It smelled of her, of him, of everything I would never hold.
I carried it like a relic,
a monument to absence,
to joy that bloomed elsewhere,
leaving my hands empty
but my chest full of memory.
The Letter
I found it in the gutter, folded once,
no envelope, no return address.
The paper smelled of ash and salt,
edges ragged, as if it had been pulled
from a fire that wanted to finish the job.
It began without greeting—
only an apology,
scrawled in a hand trembling between
scripture and seizure.
The voice was neither man nor woman,
but something exhausted,
older than the silence between stars.
They wrote:
I am sorry for rivers that run dry,
for cities cracked open like skulls,
for the hunger that grows teeth in children’s bellies.
I am sorry for thunder that never arrives,
for prayers that rot in air before reaching heaven.
I am sorry for making a world too heavy
for its own bones to carry.
The letter was signed—
*A dying god.*
I kept it, pressed between books,
a secret heirloom.
Through the years I returned to it,
as if to confirm the handwriting had not changed,
as if to prove the apology
was still meant for me.
Each reading sent a pulse
through my chest,
like the ink itself remembered
the hand that bled it.
I carried that pulse
through every ruin I built,
every silence I tried to outsing,
every grave I passed without bowing.
Now the paper is brittle,
edges breaking into dust.
The words are fading,
but the scar lingers.
I keep it still,
a keepsake of failure,
a relic of a god too human to survive
and too stubborn to vanish.
When I die,
bury it with me—
a final souvenir,
proof that even heaven
once confessed.
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Artist name - The Poetry Beast
Instagram -@the_poetry_beast
Website -https://thepoetrybeast.bandcamp.com/
Description
Artist Statement
My work treats memorabilia as a verb—an action of holding, re-naming, and re-sounding the ordinary. I’m interested in the small archives we carry: pockets, browsers, drawers that stick, photo rolls that repeat the same sky.
In poems, fragments, and micro-fiction, I try to make the overlooked item ring again: a ticket stub as liturgy, a voice memo as inheritance, a jar as a temporary cathedral for air. Formally, I move between list, instruction, and narrative to mimic how memory actually behaves—looping, misfiling, returning at odd hours with perfect detail and missing dates.
The pieces sit between nostalgia and inventory: not romanticising the past so much as noticing the present tense hidden inside it. Memorabilia, to me, is less about objects than about attention—the keepsake is simply where attention decided to sleep.
Poem — “Ticket Stub Theology”
The priest of the turnstile tore my evening in half
and handed me the smaller faith.
I kept it warm in a pocket—
a winter of lint, a cathedral of keys.
Inside, the band tuned the dark.
Someone’s shoulder became a shoreline,
and the drum kit practised weather.
I learnt applause the way cities learn rivers:
by letting go a little, by naming the bridges.
After, I pressed the stub in a book,
a leaf from the brief tree of noise.
Years later, I open to it like a door
that remembers every shoe.
Nothing happens—then everything does:
sweat rising like handwriting,
a chord smudged with rain,
the singer tipping the microphone
into our open mouths.
What survives isn’t sound,
but the thin receipt of having been there,
paper that still glows in the dark
if you cup your hands around it—
a moth that believes in lamps,
a date that keeps arriving
without checking the calendar.
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Artist name - George Lang
Instagram - @xerxeswxerxes
Website - https://alteritas.net
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Artist name
Roger David Smith
@roger.david.smith
Description
A poem for your "memorabilia" issue, about a shoebox of memories of the person you used to be. (We all have one somewhere..)
shoebox
spring cleaning on this winter’s day
I find a summer
boxed
in a drawer, forgotten like homework under socks and dust
I drag out my training shoe treasure chest
and find an unfinished book, a sere sycamore leaf
marking a place long forgotten, a story halfway told
I put it to the side and leaf through
postcards, train tickets
ideas in rough drafts
letters making plans for a future already passed
badges, guitar picks, stickers still unstuck
coloured friendship bracelets under crumpled concert stubs
back then these things mattered
friendship and music
they still matter, of course, but not as much as the bills and the child support
under a flier for a gig I missed,
I find a pile of dog-eared photos, colours still fresh
real physical photos, not selfies on a screen
still remember sending them off, waiting for weeks
to find a finger blocking that shot, that one shot
of everyone together, that one sunrise that we welcomed together with smiles and cigarettes
the moment smudged forever
can we retake it now?
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