Adam Julius Smith
Adam Julius Smith was encouraged to explore his own writing through engagement with therapeutic creative writing groups using Gestalt therapy theory and freefall writing techniques. In 2023, he joined the Mole Valley Poets, inspired by the benefits he experienced from working with a small group of poets as part of a short course at Goldsmiths University of London entitled 'Poetry: Form and Feeling'. Adam enjoys exploring and developing poetry and creative writing through contact with the Mole Valley Poets and the wider community engagement that results.
Adam has published on the UK Association of Gestalt Practitoners website and as part of The Mole Valley Poets Anthologies: Hidden Light 2024 and Otherworlds 2025.
Poems by Adam Julius Smith
| The Library on the Hill |
| Standing Stone |
| The dark and the light |
From MVP Otherworlds Anthology 2025
The Library on the Hill: Waiting for my Parents to Finish with the Pub and Marriage Guidance.
Do you remember the time when you looked between the shelves,
those musical notes on the staves of your life.
Do you remember the shelves in the dark,
loaded and heavy, their bolus of light lifting your heart.
Do you remember where you hid, deep between shelves,
books entwining you like trees, to which you wished you belonged.
Do you remember your history, from nineteen seventy-five, the story of a boy who eats his mother and survives
the world of the pub and its malodorous smell,
the Horse and the Chains at the foot of the hill,
while you lay in wait, high above,
deep in your shelves, safe in the dark.
Standing Stone
At the lighthouse on Valentia Island, County Kerry.
Upright stone
set in a bed of green,
raised rock, sprung between
the turf, grass and shore,
a beacon from another time.
I place my hands on its worn sides
and step in-tune, as in a dance
with susurrating waters all around.
I find a hollow at its base and
slide beneath the grassy mound.
Soft grave gives way to stairs beneath,
a pathway back to centuries past
and as I step, I hear the sounds
of seas and shores heard here
ten thousand years before.
In my drowsy waking dream
there lay before me knights asleep,
waiting for blasts on Dord Fiann,
for Fianna and Fionn mac Cumhaill
to rise with Erin to save us all.
Asleep on headland couched
in flowers and sand, fresh-aired
on lichen frills that line the
stately stone's proud sides I
begin to wake, you by my side.
Beneath that upright monolith
the ogham script its promise kept.
We wind our lives over clints and grykes
and hope in looking to the skies, like larks,
to stake our song in salt and sated air and fly.
Notes: the Dord Fiann is a mythical hunting horn, with Fionn mac Cumhaill often anglicised as Finn McCool a hero in Irish mythology. The Fianna are the mythological Irish soldiers of destiny who sleep underground until they are called by three blasts upon the Dord Fiann to rise and fight with Erin (Ireland).
The dark and the light
In Brugge's
dark churches,
heatless,
cold hospitals,
candles burn.
All pain is met
with light.
Across Europe,
on battlefields,
in candled halls,
fire brings
the dark
and the light.
Where candles
burn bright,
all pain
is met
with light.
In Loule, Portugal
we watch in awe,
the cathedral's
candled prayer-hut,
so hot it
melts like metal,
great strings of wax,
they wane
and slip.
wet strips
set the hut
alight.