Threnody   Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s hold on the grace of night which has seeped into day through rips in walls of sky, through holes in the carpet of earth — fractures of rock and pits of sand.   Each martial act undoes the baby’s cry for milk, the silently feeding lips which would continue into sleep; and when shells lob as precise as history it wakes before it dies.   Each martial act is enabled by the silence of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making a living’, an expression that falls as dead prayers over distance, over the local. The desert owl remembe ..read more

   Elegy for Marjorie   I’ll talk as if neither of us are here, leaves that cling or won’t fall, fourth person in the dialogue.   When the body dissolves, a unity forms around sand and leaves, the very specific songs of remaining   words. In the absence of lyrics, we make an assemblage of protests. In a lyric of absence, we haul   a grammar across that landscaping. Many meanings reduce to one when we try to utter ‘development’.   Others will be having this conversation, too. Now we’ve sorted the issue of distance. Once. For all. And.     ..read more

Les and I had a complex interaction due to different ways of seeing the world, but we still had overlaps and strong shared interests. I think Les's dynamic thinking around language will always be a vital and interesting thing, and a poem like 'Bats' Ultrasound' shows and empathy with the non-human world that is moving, emphatic and genuine. You really get the sense that he not only 'feels being bat' but can draw connection between animal and human (mammal to mammal) that is both allegorical and quite real.  Les, to me at least, seemed to identify as an outsider, and though some would say ..read more

 Graphology Superscription 3 Two poets have been imprisoned in Russia for reading poems against war in Ukraine.             Hooded crows are probing luminous gardens full of the storm. A spring tide has ripped out of Bantry Harbour exposing winter mudflats — there had been some flooding — and two people are digging for lugworms. There is a prismatic glister of oil, an iridescence of unearthly behaviours. All of this is tragic. All of this is connected. All of this aligns, though it might not seem obvious. In the violent interstic ..read more

On the need for collective, co-ordinated responses (to crimes against humanity, specifically the war on the people of Gaza): ...’only’ that peaceful interventions should (to my mind) be made in all possible contexts and that we need to speak to people to bring 'them' on board with addressing situations rather than entrench 'them' as enemies. I strongly believe that peace (in all contexts) can only come about by the privileging of open conversation, to show that human rights also involve the consciences of those who violate them and those consciences need addressing. As a pacifist, I am on the ..read more

  Rafah   A city on the edge of catastrophe. Designated ‘safe zone’ where,   defying the limits of space, over a million people   have been herded. Choke point. Crossing   to nowhere. Edge of annihilation.   Such moments too many in power   across the globe want to make history   before and as they happen. To relegate. To regret   after the fact, after massacres   have been totted up and converted to statistics.                 John Kinsella     ..read more

    John Kinsella This anti-war, pro-refugee verse play is for anyone to use without permission. I have added a sound file read by Tim, Tracy and John here. Sanctuary: for three players     Displaced Person 1   We must hurry, they will close the last crossing at midnight. Hurry!     Displaced Person 2   Why are they shutting people out? Why are they abandoning us? I cannot move faster. I am tired. My legs won’t work properly.     Person Right at Home   How much more do you expect us to give? Our homes are our castles fortresses sanctuarie ..read more

 Cento Sonnet à la P. VERGILIVS MARO   Let me make this final effort to work the fields without damage, Arethusa, before the media flee from the work, never claiming the land though ‘she’ favours its people over herself, and the fretwork of metal trees tunes only erosion.   Where there were recently olive groves there are now graves — the scent of leaves and wood lost in gunpowder, shrapnel. All prayers are blasted as the hand holds the head, the earth. Who in Sicily will hear the songs that once sprang from Gaza?   It is not our right to interfere in your disputes and yet ..read more

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'.  This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisectio ..read more

This film is part of a series of poem-films that I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. Each film is a subsection of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that focalises through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. This 'section' arose out of being unhomed by machinations within the Tübingen 'rental market' and needing to find shelter elsewhere. But the shadow over one's own life is nothing in the context of global ..read more