All articles filed in Poetry

A poem from the frontline of the NHS – a personal psalm for Good Friday

Two hundred hour stints in Mammon’s gold temple, / loneliness tempered by rites which appal

Breaking the fences, / bending the boundaries, / blind to the rules that bound / mere mortals

Who ever sees their own metamorphosis? / Those glorious suns turn to angst-ridden spheres, / Like unspoken rumours of far away wars

I’d strayed: learnt the ways of a cruel cut-throat gang

Exploring the positive possibilities of mistakes as sources of sources of learning, inspiration, discovery and reconciliation

So, when we set off prospecting/I wasn’t expecting,/not even suspecting,/we’d find El-Dorado

I shut the bin, tight,/and put it out in the road: / out of sight, out of mind. / But a place inside me, / tight shut for thirty years— / out of Africa: out of mind— / came open; came apart.

Knowing I’ve failed you, I’ve no way to constrain / the anguish and grief of that desolate ocean.

Bound in the graveyard’s wintry embrace, / Do you long, as I do, for the coming of spring, / For the soft healing waters that summer should bring, / Yet fear all the memories entombed in the ice?

All life’s struggles distilled and defined / in a tangible route to that famed mountaintop