Category: Language
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Just Words
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Forced to witness and live, day after day, this nation’s fraught and inept and demented progress towards Brexit – the unforgiveable false step, waste and wanton irrelevance of it, the tedium, obsessive delinquency, delusion, shame, the sheer disgraceful wrong and disaster of it – I retreat into words, not just for some slight relief, but…
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Poems in Public
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Poetry once belonged only in open space – the mead hall by a great fire, where flea-bitten warriors sat at table with their lord ; or a place of worship or ceremony, the wedding, the funeral. Not in private, on paper, let alone on screen. Poetry belonged in the air between people, out loud. Accordingly,…
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I Came Running
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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…
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Dust
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The poem I’m publishing here foresees the end of the world. The false god Me n’ Mine has too many worshippers to be withstood. Besides Greed, the angel which serves Me n’ Mine most faithfully is the Lie and it is the Lie by which the false god rules and will destroy us all. …
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Poet on the Cliff
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Let’s look again at St Aldhelm’s chapel, a small square Norman building on a cliff-edge. It stands at the very tip of a promontory on the Dorset coast called – a bit confusingly – St Alban’s Head. The chapel is small and dark and inside it is very damp. This is because the door…
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Poet on the Team
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Earlier this year there was a General Election in the UK. Beforehand, Theresa May had insisted she wouldn’t call one, but apparently changed her mind whilst out walking in the hills. Perhaps she saw a fox and got over-excited. For, as we all know, the election didn’t go well for her. The fox escaped and…