In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Death

  • West of Caritas

    Posted:

    “The Conversion of Saul” by Michelangelo, Pauline Chapel fresco, Vatican City.   This “I” we each inherit, made spine of the world, axis, pole, look-out from the world’s helm gazing on the universe, gazing on you, gazing on death…   “Mummy,” I said, seven or eight years old, “I have decided that I am God.”…

  • Kenwood in May

    Posted:

    Kenwood is an impressive mansion on the northern edge of Hampstead Heath, London. It and its grounds are managed by English Heritage and open to the public. It is a deservedly popular place to visit and on the day in question, I drove my dear friend the late Mary Young there. She lived nearby. Mary…

  • Facing West over a Small Field

    Posted:

    Here is a link to a poem about the poet D.J. Enright and his French wife, the artist Madeleine Enright. (See one of her pictures, above). They belonged in worlds quite foreign to me, but in the last few months of their lives, I chanced to be their next-door neighbour. I had moved into a…

  • Broken Colour

    Posted:

    … continue reading

  • The Widow

    Posted:

      Here is another poem of loss and it’s called “The Widow” (the title links to it). I wrote it some years ago, in sorrow for the grief of the person concerned, but also in awe at how she voiced her bereavement, the words she reached for, and the way she flung them out, time…

  • The Lying Toad is Back, the Tousled Look, the Winning Smirk, Our Leader…

    Posted:

    The prose piece that follows begins with the mismatch in the UK, between the present Prime Minister’s relative popularity on the one hand, and his long established disregard for the Nolan Principles of ethical conduct on the other. The piece provides a reminder that our Prime Minister has previously been sacked twice for lying  and…

  • Poems in Memoriam in Time for Lent

    Posted:

    I am uploading another collection of poems here. I am also adding it to the collections listed down the right hand side of this blog’s home page. “Another” collection, but not a new one. Some of its poems were written several years ago, although every year, I check them over and might revise them. They…

  • The Caged Parrot Watches the Demons Dance

    Posted:

    This piece returns to a preoccupation of my own, concerning language. What is the point of writing, the point of taking a  position and then articulating it ? And of course that leads to the question, why keep writing these stanzas, these mere words amid all the bizarre and frantic and disastrous political action going…