Category poems

after Dorothy Parker

my sisters, my friends. It is so easyto pick up the first stone and cast it.To declare proud and righteous, handon heart, that you have never been tempted – standing before a crowd,a host of cameras, with all the eyesof the…

not much at all...

to any one of us...

after Pastor Martin Niemöller

“They’d send a limousine anyway…”
The Clash

Play the man, and not the ball.
[written after Labour Party conference]

what if doormats were suddenly sentient?
what if elephants nested in trees?

of the British Museum find
in some forgotten room
an old earthenware lamp

To the apologists for genocide who choose
to walk in no-one’s shoes but their own

I have eaten
the future...

by now, of course, you’ll know
the way the day panned out