Recentring Death
“It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.” ― C.S
Sri Lanka Needs a Prayer – But it Also Needs a Revolution
Ten years after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, terror has returned to plague our country once more. Police reported 250 deaths and over 500 people injured during a series of eight bomb blasts on Easter Sunday. The attacks took place across a number of locations, including three churches and thr
The Magic Act
Hold me close and I disappear! It’s my most famous trick. My thin lips grin at their gasps and their cries as I vanish from your arms. There you are, as the night begins, wrapped up in show-girl spangles, and I’m pulling flowers from my wrist, a rabbit from a hat, tricks crafted [&
He Cried (Story)
I always have more to say to my friend when I’m not talking to him. He’s been having a really hard time. Today was a special case, an Essex blizzard scuffing muddy patches up hillsides. Today he hid his face in my side so he could cry: a quiet upheaval in the thick [&hellip
When we leave we need to pass this on
When we leave we need to pass this on To hop the twig with two handfuls, Head bent to follow the echo Whether an other’s or our own. When you’ve got this, then we’ll go Wading the tough river with its noise Underfoot, clay between toes Toward the jutted bank, the hang-tooth of s
I Saw the Son of Man
I I saw the Son of Man lying on the 95 – probably one of a dozen prints, someone’s elementary school project now splayed like a fossil ripely excavated, blanching in the sun – his sheltering apple strudelized. It reminds me of how the sky is, its sheer-blue polythene perforated
ALLOTMENT: A Fruit Basket Of Unresolved Sibling Tension
On the evidence of the title alone, audiences might be forgiven for thinking that Jules Horne’s Allotment, performed in the BT Studio,would be play about a very English kind of parochialism. In cultural terms, the allotment has become a powerful symbol of the upper middle-class – a section of so
The Woman of the Perfume Ad
The woman of the perfume ad is a complex construct. The advertisers who create her are geniuses of manufacturing desire, of finely chiselling models into shape with slogan and sign. Perfume ads come with tropes: her armpits are hairless; no blemish taints her skin; her hair is slicked back with seaw
Three environmental poems
When the world dies in fiction, it’s palatable because it is removed from the truth. When the world is dying in reality, perhaps it is too difficult to digest into verse. As the dry seasons lengthen and fragile climate treaties dissipate into smog, the landslide into apocalypse feels more imminent