Today I was working on teasing out a way of capturing the story of Fatima Bouchar who was arrested by the CIA with her husband Abdul Hakim Belhaj and rendered to Libya. She was four months pregnant at the time.I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that that tiny foetus, held within its terrified mother, had spent several months within such a brutal system. So I wrote a poem to try and capture that idea…

The room was white.

Starry epiphyseal centres blinking,

Growing,

Encased by loving flesh,

Itself broken and wrapped in bone,

Hard, harsh.

To noises breaking on fragile shores

Tiny calcium fragments resonate.

During the sharing at Leith Theatre, I used a small chair to represent Fatima and to provide a focus for the story. The chair was blue, I later intended it to be painted an innocuous beige, but the people who had come along to take part in the sharing, remarked on how significant it was and how the blue colour was in stark contrast to the content and seemed to represent blue skies, freedom or maybe an internal space.