Tag: Poetry
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Augustin Doing Life
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“Augustin Doing Life” is the title of a poem I wrote eight years ago. The Augustin of the title is Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the much better known and also more fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, both swept along by the upheavals of the French Revolution, and quite early in their lives, destroyed by them. They were…
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Wrestling with the Dark Angel – a series of poems
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This drawing by Gustave Doré is one of several depictions by well-known artists of an incident recorded in the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob wrestled with an angel for a night. Towards the morning, the angel touched Jacob on the thigh, which left him “halt” (lame). But afterwards, the angel blessed him and changed…
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Dame Julian of Norwich
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Dame Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. She lived in the fourteenth century and wrote “Revelations of Divine Love.” She “good counsel did give” to her visitors, one of whom was Margery Kempe who wrote an autobiography, a rare and perhaps unique thing to do at that time, especially for a woman. Likewise, Dame Julian’s…
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One Reasonable Way
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One reasonable way to weigh God’s Creation is to stand at night in open space and look upwards. Infinite dark vastness beyond measure made effectively of nothing. Scattered like dust through this archway of nothing you see pin-points of light called stars. But these, you learn, although substantive, are also dead,…
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Poems in Public
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Poetry once belonged only in open space – the mead hall by a great fire, where flea-bitten warriors sat at table with their lord ; or a place of worship or ceremony, the wedding, the funeral. Not in private, on paper, let alone on screen. Poetry belonged in the air between people, out loud. Accordingly,…