Arts Articles
‘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
‘The impact is heightened by the curator’s imaginative use of the historic setting.’
The principles of stewardship and reverence guide Seeking Routes, an art exhibition currently showing at Swarthmoor Hall. The theme is sustainability, the fragility of the natural world, and the artistic and spiritual response to it.
Looking for cows
After Meister Eckhart We went looking for God the way one looks for a cow: expecting warm flanks, soft cheese while all the universe ran away from us, its rivers of milk
Words to conjure with
It’s OK – you don’t have to call yourself a Christian. That’s a word where too many difficult relations Are all too ready to drop in, some of whom You really wouldn’t want to meet for a coffee However many custard tarts were on offer.
Luminary
In memory of RS Thomas You say the mystic, when she’s not a poet, fails to mediate the – hang on – mysterium tremendum et fascinans, (that’s God), and then you riddle us with the immediacy of the mystic Deus absconditus. So, God’s absconded, and the mystic’s in...
‘War is much bigger than just the military offensive.’
I would like to ask children and young people who may be reading the Friend for some help, conversation and contacts. We are a group set up by Southern Marches Area Meeting to support a project to promote understanding and sympathy for the plight of noncombatants during war. You will...