politics
This is what I’m listening to …
Listening and allow it to touch you soul. I just love the powerful lyrics in this singer-songwriter’s Danielle Ponder, recently performed at NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. ‘ Poor Man’s Pain.’
“Freedom, won’t you, call out their names, Freedom, won’t you, call out my name. “
Writing Elsewhere
Since May, I’ve been sharing my writing on Medium. This is a platform I’ve tired a number of times before but for some reason the habit just didn’t stick. I now know this probably had something to do with having nothing really to say. But now I do.
I’ve been contributing to the Binderful Blog, which a small online community of women, started a few years ago, which offers classes to support women questioning their lives. Maybe shaking up the status quo from the kitchen table outwards. I’m due to create a class with Binderful but in the meantime, I’ve been writing on Medium for them.
If you’re interested in checking out what I’ve shared so far then click below to read the articles.
Pandemic Food Ways: A Little Sweet Treat
Waiting To Be Allowed In
The Streets are Talking
The streets are on fire.
Smoke coats our tongues
like iron in our blood.
We walk for our rights
as weedy paths like barbed
wire lacerate our ankles.
God is in our shouts.
Demands for justice pour
forth smelling of lilies.
Winds of hope on the horizon
are felt like cherry blossom,
delicate and beautiful
but not short lived.
Malcolm X, my man
Black Lives Matter
Day 9 – Concrete Poem – being in the moment
I sit on the bed, cross legged,
window open. Hearing a kid
scream, a car engine revving.
And there, just then, a seagull
flies by carrying bunch of leaf
and twine in its beak. Say you,
what you building? Stealing?
It’s now I’m aware of the trees
trees outside coming into leaf.
Buds unfurling like green ton-
gues with beard and feathery
flower clusters. What tree are
you? And why do you reach so
to the sky as if all that matters
is to grow and thrive? Zooming
traffic, loud, draw my attention
away from nature, from inside
But that’s usually the case with
modern life: a distancing from
our true nature with incentive
of moving faster, go anywhere,
produce anything of fake worth
as if our life depends upon it.
Day 7 – NaPoWriMo – In It Together
We’re on our way back from the river,
your eyes raw bone.
Quarantined together in a tiny fiat 500,
I sit still with legs
slightly apart staring off to the right
ignoring the black line approaching
to smudge me out.
Drawn and worn as
long as the April sky,
your silence is
the dark punctuation of the day.
I’m green shoots, flowers, bumblebees
waiting to go home, back into the yellow heat,
with love everywhere waiting.
Day 1 – NAPoWriMo – In these troubling times, our way of being comes into sharp focus
April brings with it the challenge of National Poetry Writing Month. One poem per day for the next 30 days. What better way to kick start my next 100 days of blogging if you take up this challenge. So follow along as for the next 30 days , I’ll be sharing a poem I create, sometimes in response to the prompts posted over here, sometimes from other inspirations. But I’ll be hopefully following the theme of Nature for this body of work.
Day 1 – In these troubling times, our way of being comes into sharp focus
Taking out the rubbish
I’m met by a bully of a bird
on our backyard wall.
He doesn’t take his leave.
Indolent, he waiters along the bricks
beady eyeing me.
Mum used to say things
must be rough at sea
for seagulls to be so far inland.
Today, I don’t think this is the case.
I think people are no longer at sea
forcing these scavengers
reliant on the discarded chip
or bit of fish to become urban
into backyards where citizens
take their recommended
or is it permitted
daily shot of sun while in lockdown.
This seagull surveys the scene.
One foot, two foot, two foot, one.
Head jerking alert, yellow sickle beak,
hooking the air with it’s call.
Grey wings once settled now stretched
wide with an inkling to take flight
but it decides to stay, close.
Two foot, one foot, one foot two.
A shared landscape it’s always been.
Perhaps, now, more obvious
how we all have to adapt
to a new way of being
which might have us all eating grass yet.
Living Wild Studios 