Malcolm Guite

This week's show will feature Malcolm Guite's performance at the Headstand 5th Anniversary gig in September. Malcolm performed songs and poems including this one written during a walking tour round Ireland in the 70s:

In Bewley's

I look up, hands around my coffee cup,
On Grafton street in Bewley's coffee shop,
Blue Mountain, Java and Colombian,
The labels are a journey on their own.
Then the aroma as they're ground by hand,
Beans broken open out of every land,
Separate savours float across this room
Of dark mahogany, to a softer bloom
Of stained glass windows, where I sit apart
Warming my hands, and waiting on my heart
To call me to adventure. I have found my voice,
Yeats in my pocket, backpack full of Joyce.
I'm nineteen. It is nineteen seventy-seven,
And Dublin is the very gate of heaven.

www.malcolmguite.com