Arts Articles
A Quaker Woman Sends a Christmas Card to a President
This woman burns a mouse-bitten pinch of wax that passes for a candle, as she focuses the diamond of her mind on Donald.
Why I Wear Your Socks Today
I wear your socks today so that I can see more deeply into the old woman ahead of me in the post office. She is ashamed to be so slow. She says sorry, sorry to the queue as she shakes in her girlish jeans. I repeat the words you taught...
‘There is no audience quite like a prison audience.’
October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month and those who noticed were encouraged to wear purple to show their support. I have to ask, who actually did know? At Journeymen Theatre, as we engage with audiences all over the UK, performing our play on domestic abuse Rock And A Hard Place,...
Poem: A Friend reads Psalm 139 in Meeting
I sit in a different seat today. Cutting it fine, Friends slip in, join the deepening stillness. The crunch of tyres on gravel, a door-tongue carefully released, the known slow tap of ferrule on floorboard: the small sounds stir the silence which settles again, as water over a pebble or...
Silent school
Three high windows deliver the movement of summer trees and light on a central table, water jug, vase, flowers, books.
‘I don’t think poetry can be apolitical.’
Your work often deals with your own sense of mortality, and it’s not often we do interviews on hospital wards. Can you tell us a bit about why you’re here? I’m on a treatment that is difficult to provide at home. I’ve got an underlying condition...
Three bereavement poems
August 7th 2017 Today is not the day, but even in the early dawn I knew it as a day of change, of certainty of things to come. That day was close. Nurses worked with kindliness while visitors inhaled the tension and departed. But mostly I remember a day of whispering...
O brother man
O brother man, fold to thy heart thy brother; Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there; To worship rightly is to love each other, Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
Imperial Voyages of Discovery
Imperial voyages of discovery – rich chancers manning expeditions almost always equipped with the following: (1) pith helmet (ivory coloured), (2) expensive English public-school education, (3) penis. (the third item made compulsory by the second – although this item is now seen as optional at more progressive fee-paying educational establishments).
The last days
If these days are the last days I will prepare my hours a will and testimony each breath a gift each smile a legacy to pass on to the soil for the next great ascendency