Fay Young

Category: Poetry

  • What’s the story in a Russian passport?

    What’s the story in a Russian passport?

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    Some passports arouse an obliging smile While others are treated as mud. Vladimir Mayakovski A passport can conceal or reveal, open or close. Who knows how the true-blue British passport will be treated after Brexit, but right now Russian travellers are likely to be attracting more than average scrutiny at border control. And none too…

  • Irish passport to peace?

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    Please pardon any wobbly bits in the piece that follows. This was a two-fingered exercise on my iPad, written and posted by hand for Sceptical Scot from Seat 53 on the train from Edinburgh to Kings Cross. A journey long enough to explore two passports and changing identities. Travelling light, I’m sitting on the train…

  • That jiggery-pokery thing called life: poem for the new year

    That jiggery-pokery thing called life: poem for the new year

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    At first I find it hard to choose a poem from Judi Benson’s, Hole in the Wall.  She became Writer in Residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary just a year after the death of her husband, Ken Smith, and there are lines in this book which I find painful to read.

  • Silent greetings from Mars

    Silent greetings from Mars

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    Women may be from Venus but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the occasional trip to Mars. On a dreary, rain-smeared midsummer night, I land on a sociable planet light years away from Brexit Britain, and find the perfect holiday poem for my husband.

  • Talking Turkeys: five poems for Christmas

    Talking Turkeys: five poems for Christmas

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    We closed the borders folks, we nailed itNo trees, no plants, no immigrants Extinction: Jackie Kay Update December 2024: It’s very touching to see so many new views of this old post written in 2016. It’s a tribute to the great humanity of Benjamin Zephaniah who died on Thursday 7 December 2023. His loss is…

  • Red Skye at night

    Red Skye at night

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    The great giants are crumbling one by one. The Gendarme and the Cubaid are gone and the trees are sliding to the shore on Scorrybreck Morag Henriksen This is not about Brexit though goodness knows it was hard to escape the rumblings, crumblings and forebodings of separation among the unexpectedly European gathering on Skye.

  • In praise of the shipping forecast: pure poetry

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    The North wind doth blow though not very hard. Our windmill acts like a weathervane even when it’s not turning and it is facing resolutely north. We shall have snow.

  • Poetry breaks the silence of dementia

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    Over the Years, a poem about ageing and Alzheimer’s, stirs a sad, sweet memory but also hope. Dementia is part of family life – and loss – for so many of us now and I remember how it silenced my once sociable father. Yet Paula Jennings’ poetry, drawing on her work in a nursing home,…

  • Politics and a vote for love

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    But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. He wasn’t literally poor, of course. William Butler Yeats was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family at a time when the landed gentry were still in the last phase of their…

  • Poem of the week: 2 (Richard Ings)

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    Another Monday. Another Poem of the Week and by good chance  a brand new poetry book recently arrived in the post. Look out for Richard Ings.  His first collection, Occasional, is bursting with good things. Some wry, some sad, some playful, some serious, some simply beautiful.

  • Treading softly: Poem of the Week/Number One

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    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams Just over a month ago I posted a poem on Facebook for Valentines Day.  It wasn’t my poem and I had gone to no great trouble to seek it out, in fact I pinched Wendy Cope’s beautiful If We Were Never Going to Die off the front…