In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: General

  • 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…

  • Live Music Sweeps the Board

    Posted:

      A few years ago, I worked free-lance in central London as a sort of facilitator on behalf of the local mental health services. I had been trained as a social worker and for decades previously had worked as a manager of community centres for people with long term mental health diagnoses. But nowadays, I…

  • Homage to Captain Beefheart in a Time of Plague

    Posted:

           And I’ll ride homeand I’ll ride home.The sound of the tyres is soothingthe sound of the tyres is soothing.And home’s elusiveand home’s elusive. And home is where I find myselfhome is where I becomeand home is where I find myselfhome is where I become. And my head is my only houseunless it…

  • Britain’s Return to Health

    Posted:

      I want to talk about the British Labour Party which – despite everything – still occupies the ground I look to for the beginning of this nation’s regeneration and return to health. But “ground” is one thing ; the withered and stunted vegetation I see presently over-running and littering that ground, is another. To…

  • Cat Vies with Hard Drive for my Soul

    Posted:

    Our race has re-made the world to be a reflection of our own chaotic inner lives and processes. We’ve fashioned our environment in such a way that it has become our self-portrait (if we dare to look). Perhaps we see ourselves for the first time, when we look out on the world we have made.…

  • Where the Hoodlums Are

    Posted:

    The stanza was written and uploaded on the day the UK left the EU, January 31st, 2020. The picture is of a tower built in Victorian times in belated tribute to the great William Tyndale. It stands on the edge of  the Cotswold escarpment, overlooking the Severn estuary. The lovely photograph was taken by Derek…

  • What is a Hyphen to do in 2020 ?

    Posted:

    There’s A and there’s B, but that’s not all. There’s also the connection between them. What is it ? They are sharing more than just the air. They were born to share more than just opposite sides of the same wall. A hyphen-line, a connecting scratch on the page, a fragile raft of some sort…

  • Poems for Public Display

    Posted:

    I never stop yearning for good poetry to reach past its traditional catchment areas – those shelves in the bookshop marked “Poetry,” the university literature department, the dedicated arts festival, the shy, solitary and possibly eccentric brain – and find a valid place for itself in the public square, the waiting room where we all…