Category: Poetry
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The Parrot on Sanctuary
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This piece looks back to when John Skelton wrote his poem “Speak, Parrot” in the sixteenth century. All these rhyme royal stanzas about Brexit I’m writing, refer to that poem, in one way or another. It is supposed that Skelton wrote it in the precincts of Westminster, where the medieval laws of sanctuary were still…
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The Parrot and the Elephant
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This piece was written a few days after Mr Johnson became Prime Minister. Mr Toad seemed quite puffed up by now, that jolly mop on top sticking out in all directions. He was centre stage and the cameras were following him everywhere. And again we kept hearing that “Labour Must…” And “Now’s the Time…” but…
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Mr Toad Leapfrogs the Stars
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Since his accession, Mr Johnson had been upping the ante with regard to a “No Deal Brexit” and spraying money here, there and everywhere, as if Austerity had never existed. But where was all that Tory money coming from, with our economy tanking ? What about these many years of austerity cuts we’d been suffering…
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The Parrot Meets Mr Toad
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This piece was written immediately after we heard that Boris Johnson had won the Tory leadership contest. The image of Mr Toad, a rather puffed up character in the children’s book “The Wind in the Willows” had already occurred to me. The Tories seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of plagues with which to assail…
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The Parrot Studies the Human Brain
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This stanza was written just minutes before it was announced that Mr B. Johnson, sacked twice in the past for being a liar, had just become Prime Minister of the UK. He had been elected to that position, not by the country, but by members of the Tory Party, some of whom had only just…
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The Parrot Keeps Asking
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On the day this piece was written the nation was waiting to find out which of the two rival (Tory) candidates was about to take control of our nation, Hunt or Johnson. Both were hollow men, diddy men. Johnson was widely expected to get it, so no great surprise was expressed when he did. In…
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Judgement from Paradise
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I don’t think there was any immediate catalyst for this stanza, as far as date or event were concerned. In the UK, as elsewhere, there just seemed to be so few redeeming features, no 5th cavalry rescue , no clearing of the mist, no light of sanity breaking through. The thought that we make a…
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The Caged Parrot Watches the Demons Dance
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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…