Christmas is settling in around us, mushrooming up through the pavements and jangling out from the shops. We know the traditions, and we know it’s never a good time for turkeys.

This Christmas I’ll remember the turkeys, and the British poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah who died on 7 December of this year at the age of 65. Born in Birmingham, and the eldest of nine children, he knew first hand the realities of racism, domestic abuse, borstal, and prison. He was dyslexic, and by his early teens he was out of school but already he was getting known as a poet. And the poems kept coming.

Talking Turkeys was published in 1994. It feels funny and joyful, just as he so often seemed himself, but there are messages tucked inside the poem’s feathers, ones that perhaps we’re more inclined to take notice of now, than we might have been when the poem first came out almost two decades ago.

Here it is if you’d like a listen:

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023