In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: terrorism

  • Posted:

    The lines quoted above come from a book-length poem by Cahit Koytak, a distinguished Turkish poet. In Turkish, the poem is called ‘Gazze Risalesi’ and addresses two Josephs in turn, one a Palestinian boy exposed to the bombing of Gaza, and the other an Israeli young man, a bomber pilot. Cahit Koytak talks to them…

  • Posted:

    Photograph by Dimitar Dilkoff : AFP via Getty Images       Reproduced by permission of the poet and translators. Find the translation of the whole poem here. The “Poems for…the wall” website has a bilingual version on its home page. It can be viewed (and downloaded from) here. Thanks to the PEN Ukraine team…

  • HATRED : A SESTINA by Robert Friend

    Posted:

    Hatred is wanting to hurt and its fulfillment dancing on someone’s grave.   Because the insult was grave, I must repay hatred with hatred, abandon all pleasure: the dancing, the flirting, the wallowing wantings of every day. How drab their fulfillment when compared with the pleasure to hurt.   I plan to avenge the hurt…

  • Going to Work

    Posted:

      The leaves are sodden they’ll take months to become useful again. I bagged them today in a world so warm I used my fingers to rake the grass clear of their wet colours. I imagine them now as I write with the wind getting up and the fox stirring for his scavenge through the…