For a Mourner
If I’m in the right frame of mind, I can still picture the old Whitechapel. Back then, there were no sleek walkways as there are now, and the current, chic, steel arches were made of sandstone brick, darkened by soot and grime. My father lived in the area from when I was seventeen to twenty-four,
Berlin Prayer
The Spree Komtesse is groaning with passengers The tables are laden with hams and bratwurst This summer’s arteries are almost cut – Out spill the last songs of the August nights From all four chambers of her heart And the black Spree takes us rolling and rolling Cradling us down her a
Lavender
I would love to tell you of the softness of the night. I want to write of the way the sky shifts through a thousand velvet, silken blues, the pinprick stars drifting through its infinite expanse like fish through the ocean, slowly spinning around me. I want to write about how the cast of moonlight [
Go Figure
“During those days, women were mistreated to spare the guilty from chastisement. They even went as far as shaving women’s heads.” Go figure. I, whose remorse was The wretched woman Left on the pavement. The conceivable victim, Her dress in ta
Finding my way back to the nightingale
The exalted song of the nightingale has long haunted the poetic imagination. Though I have never heard a nightingale sing, I have read its lamenting melodies in the lines of Ovid, Keats, and Coleridge. The real song remains elusive, yet somehow still a familiar refrain, and I wonder whether it is po
white horse
[inspired by White Horse Hill in Folkestone, Kent] on the hill with the wind in my face: the hill where the white horse shines where they stood long ago, saw the rock, and began to carve where today the hiss of steam trains washes through the valley and lambs lie in the [&hellip
How a country’s culture of discontent reflects on the state of their democracy
It is only in the last few years that Britain has reimagined itself as a protesting nation. For Generation Z, the solidarity shown against the Iraq War is accessible not through social memory per se, but historical media. What has in fact revitalised the country’s relationship to acts of demonstra
Keratin
At night I dreamed we lived at the bottom of a lakebed and I braided your hair. My child fingers, thin as chopsticks, weaving in and out of your mass of tangled curls. Underwater, your seaweed hair floated around your head, your pale face haloed in its soft cloud. Your closed eyes like a dead [&hell
Oxford’s Identity Politics and JCR BAME Officers: Effective in raising awareness, or an exploitation of ‘emotional labour’?
PART I: The Difficulties of Anti-Racism within the Framework of Oxford Bureaucracy The Junior Common Room (JCR) Committee, akin to an undergraduate student council within each college, essentially upholds the role of overseeing student welfare, representing their views, and voicing their concerns. T