Category: General
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Gaffe Man Spans the Globe
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Congratulations to Jacinda Ardern for winning her landslide victory in New Zealand’s recent general election. And for her earlier, highly competent management of the Covid-19 virus there, in such dramatic contrast to Mr Johnson’s pathetic and disastrous flounderings here in the UK, half a world away (“alas, alas”). Here is the message our hopeless Mr…
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My Way to You
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I keep coming upon this poem in its folder, its digital “archive,” and it’s as if I’ve tripped up on it. It somehow sticks out, sitting meekly under “M” in its alphabetical order. But where really does it belong ? I never quite know what to make of it and yet I think it is…
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Homecoming
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The “home” I was thinking of when I wrote this poem is a particular landscape I happen still to love, not only because, in its own way, it is beautiful, but because I associate it with a seminal time in my life, a time of growth, of emergence, of true beginning. And at that…
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Wild Honey UK 2020
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This poem above is actually a very loose translation of “Wild Honey” by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The slightly altered title here is an acknowledgement of just how loose the translation is. The poem’s original was written (I think) in 1933. Stalin had been in power for around a decade and his…
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The Gaze Blank and Pitiless
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WB Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” was written almost exactly a century ago, but if it’s possible for a poem to become truer still with age, then surely this one does. And yet…Yeats wrote his poem in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence…
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West of Caritas
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“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.”…
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I See Everywhere the False
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I thought this was true in 2014, when it was written. I did not know then that the truth can become truer.… continue reading