In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Death

  • 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…

  • A Brexiter Takes Stock of the Dark Star

    Posted:

    I know that, in writing this, I was remembering a scene from an early “Star Wars” film. An ominous planet approaches. And I remember that image occurring to me, when I came across a book by Iain McGilchrist called “The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.”…

  • Augustin Doing Life

    Posted:

    “Augustin Doing Life” is the title of a poem I wrote eight years ago. The Augustin of the title is Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the much better known and also more fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, both swept along by the upheavals of the French Revolution, and quite early in their lives, destroyed by them. They were…

  • One Reasonable Way

    Posted:

      One reasonable way to weigh God’s Creation is to stand at night in open space and look upwards.   Infinite dark vastness beyond measure made effectively of nothing.   Scattered like dust through this archway of nothing you see pin-points of light called stars.   But these, you learn, although substantive, are also dead,…

  • I Came Running

    Posted:

    When Theresa May, the UK’s Conservative Prime Minister, called an election for June 2017, her manifesto included an opportunity to repeal New Labour’s ban on fox hunting. The Conservatives had expected to increase their majority, which would have eased May’s ability to push through Brexit. Instead they lost it.   I came running. I’d heard…