Back at the Beaney
After a long break, I am pleased to be back in the Community Room of the library at the Beaney offering a weekly Words for Wellbeing Session. Every Friday from 2pm-4pm, we gather, write from prompts and read a poem together and write in response. [...]
Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it.
This disarmingly simple poem by Lisel Mueller is called Curriculum Vitae and describes a long life in 20 short stanzas with allusions to the great events of history. The Latin phrase – the course of a life – carries echoes of the various meanings [...]
And beauty came
It was with huge relief I saw a baby great tit make it out of the giant flower pot where its parents have woven the hugest complicated nest of moss and fluff. It looked around bemused for around ten minutes before making it safely across [...]
Its papery nest
The half-way point of the year has passed. The longest day was celebrated at two labyrinths. The garden is starting to ‘go over’ partly because of the hot, dry, sunny weather we’ve enjoyed in Kent for the past couple of months. I’ve travelled a lot [...]
Teach a thing its loveliness
I can’t keep out of the garden. I am not a natural gardener – ‘gardening’ feels a bit domestic for my taste, all that taming and tidying, a bit like doing housework outside. But something is changing in me. After five years here I'm beginning [...]
How can I move to September while he remains in August?
In poetry therapy and expressive writing groups, loss is always close to the surface and informs much of what it is we want or need to write about. As Kahlil Gibrain wrote in The Prophet, ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked’ and it can easily [...]
