Your Voice

Your voice

Rises as smoke from a chimney, wandering afar

Dances like flames warming a stagnant room

Burnishing the walls with honeyed amber.

Your voice

Speaks of the heart’s unseen, hidden depths

Weaves the spiralling universes of your thoughts

Across an empty blank page.

Your voice

Takes a candle to every frozen word, ignites them 

They’re beautiful, effervescing with starlight,

Captures the glistening beauty of bubbles wrapped in glass.

Your voice

Sings along to a cacophony of colliding stars 

Paints the cosmos with colours undiscovered

The Mind’s Canvas bright with silent melody.

Your voice

It lingers, even now,

echoing throughout boundless space

Stars whisper in unison, 

A chorus overlapping, flawlessly synchronised

Listen softly, always to be heard.

Your voice. Timeless. Infinite.

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This piece is a part of a tribute to Exeter student Jaz Kenny. As well as featured online, this tribute will be published in the upcoming print journal.

‘It is a privilege to teach first year students in their first term – to be part of a time of discovery, excitement, and flowering. One student who began her degree in English and Creative writing in 2021, and who was full of promise and imagination, was Jaz Kenny. It was a terrible shock to all of us when we learned that she had died, suddenly, from medical complications, just a few weeks into her time as a student at Exeter. As convenor and lecturer on the introductory Creative Writing module, Write After Reading, I wasn’t lucky enough to get to know Jaz personally; but many of her fellow students were, and so was her seminar tutor, and her death touched all of us deeply. To honour Jaz’s passion for creative writing, her fellow first year Creative Writing students decided to produce a collection of creative tributes to her. Those tributes, together with three of Jaz’s own poems that she composed as part of her course, are included in this special issue, published with love and care by the wonderful team at Enigma Journal. Jaz, and your family, this is for you.’

Ellen Wiles, Lecturer in Creative Writing