New Podcast 

Episode 24 – ‘the cherished pattern no one can efface’

The Poetry of Resistance

Here are some excerpts from my as yet unpublished cycle of poems entitled

Some Canvasses 

from Dark Room with Freshly Kindled Fire

What will you do now that the meaning hidden 

behind the words you love, is taken and splashed

red upon the altars of well-known demagogues? 

from Crowds in Soho Square

You know the pain of bearing, of suffering and 

enduring. Can you offer some relief to the 

blind streets, as so many have lost contact 

with the curative, with the sound of their own soul? 

from Study of Feet on Soho Streets 

Fearing the framing of empty words, trusting feelings to 

stir a stark eloquence, needing to plumb depths, sinking

their own wells, fresh water that cannot be poisoned,

in a deep aquifer, a source beyond their grubby reach.

from Portrait of Poets in a Time of Terror

As to my palate I add yellow ochre to sing 

of the sun’s flower in the midnight’s sky’s

Prussian Blue and reclaim the darkness. 

So let us proclaim the mystery of faith, 

faith in the uncertainty of our eggshell life. 

‘When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we cannot even remember it’s there. 

But it is still there. 

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. 

Sooner or later, the debt is paid.’*

‘Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: 

What is the cost of lies?’*

*from Chernobyl the HBO  Miniseries written by Craig Mazin