Posts Tagged ‘humanity’

Thanks to the flexible hours of my job (which I love), I haven’t been on a rush hour tube for a long time. One day after a radio interview with NTS live, I boarded a crowded train during rush hour. You know the scene; the one where you’re squashed in between several people, trying not to breathe in someone’s armpit or get a mouthful of someone else’s hair and you wriggle about to avoid bum contact with a stranger you can’t see behind you.
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photo courtesy sxc.hu

The point of remembering
history,
Is not to harbour hate
against
the people that inflicted
pain,
but to avoid the same mistakes,
to not
repeat the same mistakes

Written for and performed at the Paraa Charity Launch Night on Saturday 11th June. Watch a recording here kindly provided by a friend (the sound drops quite low after the first few seconds so may need to crank up the volume). Also shared at One Shot Wednesday.

The way that crimson liquid leaks
from your cut skin, so would it from mine‏
should I have been where you are

This blood that swirls and twirls
within the walls of these veins (more…)

photo courtesy of sxc.hu

“Excuse me!” I heard a man call out to someone who’d just got off the central line train at Mile End station. I looked up to see the other man pause on the platform.

“You dropped your phone,” said the first man in glasses. A smiling man on the train passed the mobile phone to the bespectacled gentleman on the platform. He took it quickly, a few seconds before the train door gave its shrill warning and closed.

I watched him pass the phone on to the man to whom it belonged and who thanked him, I presume, before the train whisked me away from the moment into the dark tunnels of the London underground.

It made me smile, this act of kindness on a soaking wet and solid grey Summer’s day.

Me above the world. Photo by Alex Turner

Plunging
through iced wind
A teardrop
of colour

Suspended
above terra
Serenity
hung timeless

Earth’s curvature
Cool blueness
Floating
motionless

Miniature
structures
painted grass
and model cars

expand
beneath feet
standing
on air

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I joined Poet in the City as a volunteer I think last September because I liked what they were about, and wanted to get more involved in the poetry scene. Then in December I agreed to manage an event for them – Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which is finally taking place next Monday 7th March (and for which I am trying not to be nervous about). And also help with social media side by tweeting regularly.

This week has been pretty crazy in preparation for it, mostly dissecting the many emails I’m getting from various people and responding to them in the best way possible. Along which I had to also write a blog post for the event, which I’ve done and was published earlier today as Does Spenser’s Faerie Queene speak to today? at Poet in the City’s blog. (more…)

I like how bus drivers flash 
each other on passing by, their 
faces breaking into joyous 
grins of recognition, their hands 
waving full of familiarity and
camaraderie
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