In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: politics

  • Let the bird of paradise speak loud from his cage

    Posted:

    I want to recite to camera a long poem, originally by John Skelton. And I want to do so from the top of the Tyndale Monument, a tall tower on a hill near Bristol.  William Tyndale and Skelton both lived in the reign of Henry VIIIth but they have more than that in common. The…

  • The Scottish Referendum : odd thoughts

    Posted:

    The campaign has not just energised Scots and many more – it will surely have embittered many, too. How will Scotland fare once the decision is made and the “sides” stand back from the barricades, the losers looking at the winners in the eye ? Will they help each other put the barricades away ?…

  • I See Everywhere the False

    Posted:

      I see everywhere the false, the masked, the sleek and hollow, the bought and the creatured.   Their words twist the wind tug at my mind and steal from me the hymns of my life the sacred.   True words die the moment they pass between these creatures’ teeth.   Humanity is on the…

  • Our present democracies will not rescue us from ourselves.

    Posted:

    For the young, it will already seem a long time ago that the Soviet Communist bloc effectively closed down, its remarkable leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing “Perestroika,” its various constituent states, including Russia itself, “giving way” to democracy in remarkably quick succession. A major symbol of that dramatic and joyful time was the destruction of the…

  • Cat vies with Hard Drive for my soul

    Posted:

    A psychiatrist called Iain McGilchrist has written what in my opinion is an extraordinary and important book called “The Master and his Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.”  I feel instantly at home with, and liberated by, its central thesis. Here is a quote from the blurb on the…

  • Word from Myanmar

    Posted:

    Last week, I added six new poems to the bilingual collection called “Poems for…one world.” All the new poems were Burmese, our fifty-first language. Remember that Burmese is a language whose speakers are themselves presently learning to be free again, to speak freely. You can access the six poems here .  You can read the…

  • Mental Health Witness – are UK services getting worse ?

    Posted:

    I was at an event at the Poetry Society in London the other night, celebrating the 21st anniversary of a small charity concerned with mental health and creativity. The charity’s Chair stood up and suggested that mental health services are actually worse now than they were when the charity was founded, all those years ago.…

  • A Statement of Principle in time for Christmas

    Posted:

    I suspect that many of us see “principle” as something we can just hive off and leave in airy-fairy land while we hurry out to do our Christmas shopping.  So I’ll say straightaway that, on the contrary,  true and meaningful principle may in the end be the only fact that counts, far more significant and…