Year: 2016
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Life expectancy
Here is a poem I wrote, prompted by estimates of rising life expectancy across most of the world, so that on average we might live into our nineties, if not beyond. Life expectancy At fifty-one I sleep in loss, Broken at last on fortune’s wheel. To ninety-one I wander with a pauper’s plan; No early […]
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Lament
Here is a poem I wrote a couple of months ago amidst the endless stream of bad news we must face each and every day. Lament The talk today is of war and civil strife Jacked cars and hijacked souls Shootings, beheadings and preachers of hate Two parties shouting across a beige panel A drowned […]
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Poem: No Markers
Here is another poem, belonging in my Dr Cogito series, if without any direct naming of this persona. No Markers There are no markers for when I pass To this world that holds me fast But permits at least with frequent trips Brief reports on conditions there Most of the lands are unmapped The cities […]
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Ragnarök
A.S.Byatt has written a short and puzzling book, Ragnarök: the end of the gods (2011, public library). It is a kind of tribute to the Norse myths that she learned as a child through a gift from her parents of a book, Asgard and the Gods. Most of the book is told through the eyes […]
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Perestroika
Towards the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia (2016), Gorbachev recounts an anecdote told in a speech by Richard Pipes, the American historian of Russia and a former Cold War warrior, although this appelation is rather a simplification. Pipes was given the task of giving a speech in honour of Gorbachev many years after […]
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Dr Cogito’s Fall
Here is another in the series of poems featuring Dr Cogito that I have been writing. Dr Cogito’s fall To this no-man fathomed deep, In Dante’s written hell, Down long, down cold, to flames I fell. To the great men in union dues I begged revenge to ill effect, In the plumbers room, Where power […]
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Democracy’s discontents
Election nights are rites of reunification. The divisions of a society spew out over weeks, with licensed vitriol and contemptuous sneers permitted for all, and then as the consequences of the strife are tallied, the champions of right and wrong bicker about predictions and polls and the latest certainties they have received by rumour. Then […]
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Predicting Donald Trump
This is the post I wrote on 22 July this year: https://theburningarchive.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/donald-trump-and-americas-wounded-pride/ Just as one should be careful of what you wish for, one needs to be careful what you predict! Part one of the prediction – Trump will win – has proven right. Part two is that he will fail. But those weaknesses of […]
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Blessed rage for order
This morning I read through two more chapters of Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization, which broadly covered the nineteenth century and the gentle transformations from madhouses to asylums to lunatic hospitals, from moral treatment to alienism or psychological medicine to psychiatry, and from madness to mental illness or, still worse, degeneracy. The term, psychiatry, was […]
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Inspirations on being
Yesterday I listened to the On Being podcast, which is surely one of the jewels of our culture, in which Krista Tippet interviewed, in the way of the times in front of a live audience, the Irish poet, who before yesterday I had never heard of, Michael Longley. It was an inspiring chat, from a charming […]
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The Chinese Ancients
I have had a dry spell the last few days, and so have dug into my archive for material for my post. This poem I wrote a few years ago, but it spoke to me this morning as I have been wrestling with writing about that most perfect symbol of the monstrosity of power, Ivan […]
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The book of my soul
Image source: Gitksan woman Shaman and Chief, Kispiox, British Columbia, 1909, by George Thornton Emmons Collection no. 131 (University of Washington Libraries) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Why do we write poetry? In a world of inexhaustible archives, where we are overwhelmed with voices, why would we ply our own into the unending and infinite conversation? […]
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