Category: Poetry
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Four poems for a budget of winners and losers – what hope?
Who and where are life’s winners and losers? North, South, East, West, there’s precious little poetry in the words and numbers of budgets, but pausing for breath on edge of Winter Solstice darkness, here’s a selection of poems drawing on a wealth of experience, the kind of human insight that could enhance political debate – and…
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Mother Country, get it right: Benjamin Zephaniah
It’s very touching to see so many new views of this old post. It’s a tribute to the great humanity of Benjamin Zephaniah who died on Thursday 7 December 2023. His loss is mourned but his poetry lives on. As first published on Sceptical Scot in 2016. [In 2016, on 50th anniversary of Race Relations…
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Sunset song for the winter solstice
The winter sun just hangs over the ridge of the Coolags. Its setting will seal the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. At this season the sun is a pale wick between two gulfs of darkness. So wrote George Mackay Brown, the observant eye of the great Orkney poet seeking out the touch…
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For future generations: buried poetry
How will we remember this time? How will future generations see us? Will we survive the triple onslaught of pandemic, war and climate change?
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The sound of loosening ice
“I’ll be mighty pissed off if I die in my last year at work,” he texted last March as Covid put paid to his plans for earlyish retirement. Perhaps my GP brother’s hands-on approach to work influenced my personal response to Gael Turnbull’s poetry.
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Poetry and song for a pandemic
Look up. Only look up. The night sky framed in my window is an escape from lockdown. Into darkness or light?
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West Highland trainlines of poetry
No need for narrative as the small Scotrail train pulls out of Glasgow Queen Street – the coming and going of industrialisation is written on the landscape.
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Balanced in between Ireland and Britain
When Marcia died in 1991, seven years before the Good Friday Agreement, her coffin was carried downhill to the church, Ulster-style, the weight born on the shoulders of men from friends and family. Balanced between Catholics, Protestants and non-believers.
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Five poems to defy populists
I wrote this for the 2019 election when there was good reason to be fearful. Five years on, we face another election in a turbulent time. And yet. Courageous compassion and conscience are precious human strengths. These five poems defy fear, anger and distrust.
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Edinburgh Makars mak mischief
No mics, no loudspeakers, no wham-bam poetry slam. This was a poetry stand-up with a difference – a gently subversive event in the commercial centre of Edinburgh.
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For love of life
I thought back to another year I knew Autumn, lifting potatoes and stacking peats On Mull… Ruthven Todd There it is. Reading aloud from his latest book, Alexander McCall Smith nabs a furtive shadow from another time with a few lines from Ruthven Todd’s poem written in 1938.