In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Truth Telling

  • Of Animal and Other Meetings Book Launch

    Posted:

    The book itself is already online and for sale on this blog to the right of the home page. It is a collaboration between me, the author of the poems, and the members/artists of the Portugal Prints community, who produced the illustrations. Portugal Prints is based in Camden and run by Brent, Camden and Westminster Mind.…

  • Parrot on the People’s March

    Posted:

    The people marching in London today were without a prime minister, or a leader of the opposition, or for that matter an effective political party to represent their interests. With jumped up fantasists from the bottom league running this nation, the people out on the streets today were giants and restored the nation’s honour, reminding…

  • Parrot’s Cage

    Posted:

    … continue reading

  • The Parrot Seeks a Cage

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    Here is that parrot again, bird of paradise, thundering from his cage in rhyme royal, claiming his liberty to speak his truth. He fears for his young and sees no true or worthy leaders anywhere, merely creatures of self-interest seeking their own gain from our flounderings in the valley of the shadow… Or put it…

  • Lying to a Sovereign People is a crime of High Treason.

    Posted:

      A few days ago, my partner pointed her rather basic smart phone in the direction of my aging mug and held the phone there, with amazing steadiness, while I talked at it for the next three minutes. I argued that, if a holder of public office, or applicant for public office, or candidate for…

  • Parrot Addenda

    Posted:

    Since the Summer of 2018, I have been writing a series of stanzas in rhyme royal, mostly on the subject of Brexit. Each has been written as a separate item, rather than as part of a longer poem. They were produced in response to, and often very soon after, various events and announcements that occurred…

  • The Crier Frets

    Posted:

    They keep coming, still in Rhyme Royal. Once it was the parrot who begged liberty to speak. But now he’s become the town crier, in a cage, caught in a storm. Today’s stanza was brought to mind by a good piece by Matthew d’Ancona. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/05/networked-far-right-tommy-robinson  It was featured in The Guardian, today.… continue reading

  • Going Nowhere to Mean Nothing

    Posted:

    After the 2016 EU referendum,Theresa May kept intoning “The People have Spoken” with lugubrious reverence, as if trying to portray herself as some sort of priestess delivering holy writ. In fact, from first to last, from that unsound and unseemly referendum rumble, full of highly dodgy rude-boy doings, to our present horrendous and dishonourable impasse,…