In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Political Leadership

  • The Widow

    Posted:

      Here is another poem of loss and it’s called “The Widow” (the title links to it). I wrote it some years ago, in sorrow for the grief of the person concerned, but also in awe at how she voiced her bereavement, the words she reached for, and the way she flung them out, time…

  • A White Shirt Writ Large in the Rose Garden

    Posted:

    Dear MP’s Office Manager, Thank you for your earlier response and yes, please, I would like to hear the Cabinet Office’s response to your news, that by the 26th May you had already received 1500 emails concerning Mr Cummings. I need to report that the responses I’ve heard so far have just left me brimming…

  • The Lying Toad is Back, the Tousled Look, the Winning Smirk, Our Leader…

    Posted:

    The prose piece that follows begins with the mismatch in the UK, between the present Prime Minister’s relative popularity on the one hand, and his long established disregard for the Nolan Principles of ethical conduct on the other. The piece provides a reminder that our Prime Minister has previously been sacked twice for lying  and…

  • Making the Earth Whole

    Posted:

    The voice of truth is bound to be a lonely one. That would seem to be a rule in human life.  For a race in question, it spells disaster. These three articles are worth reading, if you have not already read them : From the BBC  From the Independent  From today’s Observer   … continue reading

  • The Establishing of Ground

    Posted:

    The reference here is to a book and an image I keep referring to. It is called “I and Thou” and is by Martin Buber. Buber compares two essential ways of reaching out beyond the Self to meet the world : one is I – It (my object) and the other I – Thou (my…

  • Songs from our Seclusion (congratulations, Keir Starmer)

    Posted:

    What can poetry offer our enforced Corvid-19 seclusion, this locked-in time of question, tension, upset and loss, this desert time ? In some eras and cultures, poetry has played and still plays a major role in the community’s life. In others, barely any. And only partly does that depend on how good the poets are.…

  • 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.…