Category: Poem of the week
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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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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.
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What’s the story in a Russian passport?
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…
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Irish passport to peace?
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…
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That jiggery-pokery thing called life: poem for the new year
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.
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Silent greetings from Mars
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.
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Talking Turkeys: five poems for Christmas
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…
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Red Skye at night
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.
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In praise of the shipping forecast: pure poetry
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.
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Poetry breaks the silence of dementia
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,…