In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: I – Thou

  • Rome Burning

    Posted:

    I run a charity called “Hyphen-21”. The charity holds and manages funding for a project which publishes bilingual poem-posters. Since the Spring of 2017, this project has been called “Poems for …the wall” (before that it was called “Poems for…). Since it first began in 1997, “Poems for…the wall” has been funded by the UK…

  • HATRED : A SESTINA by Robert Friend

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    Hatred is wanting to hurt and its fulfillment dancing on someone’s grave.   Because the insult was grave, I must repay hatred with hatred, abandon all pleasure: the dancing, the flirting, the wallowing wantings of every day. How drab their fulfillment when compared with the pleasure to hurt.   I plan to avenge the hurt…

  • Despatches to my Gazan Son

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    Justin C McIntosh has given his permission for his photograph above to be used for the cover of a long Turkish poem by Cahit Koytak, now published as a book with an English translation alongside. I am proud to have been one of the translators. The original Turkish poem is called Gazze Risalesi.  In English…

  • The Brain’s a Tunnel

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    Owl sculpture by Dorothy Love… continue reading

  • Naming the Beast of the Year

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      This beast has our country’s contours written all over it. It has leapt from out of the ruins of the city, those hollow squares, and from the great labrynth below ground where the thread got tangled, and from the wi-fi and the wires through which we do not speak but intone like digital toys…

  • The late David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham

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    Following the death of David Jenkins on September 4th, I want to bear witness in my own small way to his great stature as a man and true priest. The first obituaries I read gave prominence to his Virgin Birth and Resurrection “denials.”  And of course, in his time, he was called “The Red Bishop”…

  • 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…

  • Riding the Hyphen between I and Thou

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    With our present tumult and travails in mind, I have remembered a series of poems I wrote in the mid-nineties called “I Hyphen Thou.” I thought they might be relevant then, but they seem even more so now. Below are two short extracts. The idea of the hyphen is based on a book called “I…