In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Tag: language

  • The False God called Me ‘n Mine

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  • Lament at UK Election time 2017

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      I cannot just argue or disagree when my own country decides to throw itself into the sea.   If Britain is an oak tree centuries old, then I am a leaf somewhere to one side, barely visible and increasingly wrinkled.   But the great tree’s nature still courses through me and my short life…

  • The Flotsam of Frantic Dreams

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      We don’t know any more where our lives belong or even where to hide. The walls of home hold nothing up or out and the door hangs slack on the hinge.   Where have our lives gone ?   I consult the news and the world ended several days ago. Today it’s ending all…

  • High Noon this Easter

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    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…

  • The Rule of the Rough Beast

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      The “Rough Beast” is a phrase from “The Second Coming” by YB Yeats. Written in 1919, it is a poem that becomes more topical with each passing day. The last three lines of the poem above are a deliberate reference to TS Eliot’s lines from “Four Quartets” – “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality.” And…

  • Rome Burning

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    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…

  • Despatches to my Gazan Son

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    Justin C McIntosh has given his permission for his photograph above to be used for the cover of a long Turkish poem by Cahit Koytak, now published as a book with an English translation alongside. I am proud to have been one of the translators. The original Turkish poem is called Gazze Risalesi.  In English…

  • The Angel Overhead

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      In his grief, he asked the angel hanging overhead, his faceless confessor  : Why, Lord, do sinners’ ways so grossly prosper ? How can you allow the Lie so fatly to preside ? And the angel answered : I invited you to my feast, my laden tables, my radiant halls, and for my reward,…