This poem is another written recently and pretty fast, though some aspects of it have been fermenting for quite a while, I suspect.
But the immediate catalyst was Prime Minister’s Question Time last Wednesday (November 30th). Starmer talked about Winchester College (public school) and the exemption from VAT enjoyed by these long-established playing fields (and citadels) of wealth and privilege.… continue reading
Category skills of love
… How to Speak in Times of Clamour
A long time ago, I went away to Greece and spent three months there alone in a hut, facing the rock pictured above. By now, I had lived a youth and much of an adulthood and this was a time for reflection, in case I could make some sense of all that living, never to be repeated or recaptured, all… continue reading
West of Caritas
“The Conversion of Saul” by Michelangelo, Pauline Chapel fresco, Vatican City.
This “I” we each inherit, made spine
of the world, axis, pole,
look-out from the world’s helm
gazing on the universe,
gazing on you,
gazing on death…
“Mummy,” I said,
seven or eight years old,
“I have decided
that I am God.”
We were walking east
along Glebe Road… continue reading
The Parrot Speaks of Fre-dom
In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer introduced Rhyme Royal to English poetry and all these stanzas of mine about Brexit share that long established rhyme scheme. And Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales and one of those is “The Franklin’s Tale” which I love. And that’s where this medieval word “fre” keeps appearing, later to become “freedom.” But in The Franklin’s… continue reading
Rafts in the Flood
The lords of misrule continue to flood our minds and lives with their disgraceful doings. But I can speak here of two small developments which, for me at least, are cheering and act in a way as rafts. One concerns a new website, designed by Joseph Wolf : https://poemsforthewall.org Here is an image taken from the site. It illustrates… continue reading
… High Noon this Easter
Let’s recall the film “High Noon,” that great Western. The outlaw and his hoodlum cronies are riding into town. They want revenge on the sheriff, the keeper of the law. The sheriff scours the town looking for support, a posse of townspeople who will help him defend their community from the outlaws. The townspeople know him well and trust him.… continue reading
Rome Burning
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 Arts Council, the NHS, the… continue reading