Culture Articles
Policeman, Stoke Newington
Standing close up to a policeman, I can get a free look at his uniform, its unrevealing midnight matt cloth and silvery buttons, its clever gussets, and places for his walkie talkie, yes, his walkie-talkie tucked under his tunic. Serious tailoring.
Deep Field
The first edition of the latest collection by our Friend Philip Gross sold out so fast that there were no copies left for the book launch and the publishers had to organise a hasty reprinting. What was it about a slim volume of modern poetry that, far from intimidating people,...
The Heron
The heron fishes in the tide With cans and crisp bags at his side I watched him fishing in the place where tide and river interface Midst mud and oil and salt and slime Patiently he takes his time
A Quaker at Sea
It is the ‘Great Depression’. Your father’s Scarborough high street business has gone bust. You are fifteen years old and must leave your Quaker school. You are offered an apprenticeship in the merchant navy, although no one in your family has a history of going to sea, and you...
Seeing animals differently
In their introduction to Living By Voices We Shall Never Hear - a collection of reflections, poems and essays - editors Pauline and Les Mitchell put the matter bluntly: for thousands of years, nonhuman animals ‘have been our unpaid, unacknowledged and, for the most part, appallingly treated slaves on whose...
The pilgrimage paradox
‘To kneel where prayer has been valid.’ This line from TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, quoted in the preface of Arthur Kincaid’s new book The Cradle of Quakerism, sums up the paradox that Quakers have to surmount when deciding how to commemorate and celebrate their roots. For prayer can...
Settling
Not quite silence but on the other hand the ambient sounds diminish –
Corridors of light
A while ago I heard someone on the radio use the expression ‘mental furniture’. She was referring to those comforting thoughts and ideas that come to the forefront at times of trouble, anxiety, illness or perhaps even danger. They are the thoughts that we turn to in order to give...
Black Fire
The subtitle of Black Fire is African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights, though no definition of spirituality is given. I would offer: spirituality – a growing into relationship of self with deeper self; self with neighbour; self with cosmos; held together in an embrace of Spirit. What, then, would...
Departure
I am part of what once was But might be so again. Did we love once? Were we one? Two hearts with but a single rhythm?