In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: arts

  • Sayings

    Posted:

    Reaching for words is like searching the earth for stones and then shaping them one after another into a path.     Your words took my breath away. They killed me with their song. They made my womb turn over. Sing to me again.   The words I must speak will sentence me to death.…

  • Can Liberal Democracy Survive our Tumult ?

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    Can liberal democracy survive our tumultuous, bewildering, frightening, dangerous times ? Can it surmount them ? Can it contain and even direct the flailing social forces at work towards positive solutions, a viable human future ? As things stand, it seems not to be coping at all. It is surely in great danger of allowing…

  • Six Truth Works Three Tattoos

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    Here in the UK, recent elections and this Summer’s cataclysmic EU referendum have been opportunities for liars, demagogues and PR specialists to practice their skills on the population, in order to sway it to their will. The phenomenon is not unique to the UK, nor of course is it unprecedented. But the pervasive dishonesty, recklessness…

  • Three Poems post-Brexit

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      Last Stand   The hyphen between I and Thou is our last stand and foothold. There’s nowhere else to retreat to. No set answer no fixed place. Centuries back the desert fathers came here and left strange word behind among skull and thigh bone and the odd green shoot forced into life through ardent…

  • The Inn this Advent

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    Photograph by Robert Atanasoski/AFP/Getty Images. Expulsion I heard this song tonight from the desert the shelters below ground there and the wrecked homes and I heard it from the grey waters just south of Europe, with winter coming on and the boat leaking and from the guard posts and barbed frontiers that now cover a…

  • Truth tells – another time

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    Aortal Bleeding Perhaps our Creator lacks a mind and therefore had no plan for how yours and mine would work. In which case our lives and history are just a continuous accident like a river nosing downhill chancing on points of give. But it’s hard not to decipher a certain deliberation verging on cruelty in…

  • Going to Work

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      The leaves are sodden they’ll take months to become useful again. I bagged them today in a world so warm I used my fingers to rake the grass clear of their wet colours. I imagine them now as I write with the wind getting up and the fox stirring for his scavenge through the…

  • Dignity and Light

    Posted:

    Two new poem collections are about to be uploaded on the website of the project I run, called “Poems for…“. One of them is on Learning Disability and is called “Poems for… Bridges to Learning Disability”  The other is on mental ill-health and is called “Poems for…Self at Sea“. The poems in both collections bring……