This is a heist! An old-fashioned smash and grab!Put your awards and prizesYour glorious enterprises,Those golf clubs and rackets,Your fancy shoes and branded jackets,Put them all in the sack.Don’t expect to get them back.This is a smash and grab!You, take your child’s milk teeth out of your purseAnd those photos of family gatherings – Years […]
Category: Poems (Page 1 of 2)
This poem describes my travels during the summer of 2024. At some point towards the end, when we were staying in Hartland, North Devon, I realised that there was an unexpected connection in the poems I had written about each stage of my journey. I felt they worked best as a single piece and this […]
This is one of a few poems I have written in the Scots tongue – it just flows so much better. Maya Angelou said this: “My name is Maya Angelou. I grew up on dirt roads… I was a mute. I was poor and black and female. The only key I had which would open […]
This poem comes out of an evening in Cambridge organised by Palestinians, Jews and others, where we shared music and dance and discussed the terrible events in the Middle East. At it Rowena and I sang words from Seamus Heaney’s poem The Cure at Troy which I had put to music. We sang ‘believe in […]
In St Mungo’s Cathedral, Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands, there is a tapestry made from remnants of materials found in Norwegian churches (old curtains, tablecloths and so forth). The tapestry had been gifted by a Norwegian diocese as a demonstration of their bonds of affection for people of the Orkney Islands. I thought this was […]
Kayaköy is just south of Fethiye in south west Turkey. Ro and I walked there with friends in 2024 and the photo (with thanks to Roger Giddings) below shows me, shielded from the bleaching sun, at the start of the Lycian Way (which passes by Kayakoy). One hundred years earlier, in 1923 the community of […]
The Atlantic Way is the network of roads down the west coast of Ireland. Rowena and I were staying in Toberpatrick Cottage near Sligo, which is not far from the Atlantic Way. Each evening I was re-reading Yeats (who was buried in Sligo) and reflecting on his Ireland. This made me think that the tourists’ […]
I find that travel sharpens how we see. And what we see may or may not be what is there. But for me, this really happened. On 5th Avenue, at the end of a New York week without much joy,I walked behind a couple in their eighties.He walked with difficulty, she rode her mobility scooter.He, […]
A group of artists were creating sketches of an ancient elm in the corner of Washington Square, New York, and asked me to join them. I explained I was better with words than images, but suggested I could write the tree a poem. Here it is – more or less as performed in Washington Square […]
This poem is about the funeral of the mother of one of my very best friends. The funeral was not far from Kyle of Lochalsh on a sun-filled spring day. Everything was as described – even the two sea eagles. Indeed two sea otters playing in the sea the next day didn’t get into the […]