New Kid on the Blog

Just to keep things going - here's a poem from TS Eliot for this day of Epiphany The Journey Of The Magi A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a runn...

Happy Easter! Alleluia - Christ is risen! In case I've not mentioned it before - sometimes when this blog is quiet (tumbleweed style) I am also blogging on our Church website.  There is a staff blog there which I try to contribute to as I am able. Two particular postings I'd like to point you towards rather than rehashing them here are the Good Friday meditations which I led - which used poetry and prayers based around the Seven Last Words of Christ from the cross - and some Easter Sunday thinkings which went hand in hand with my Easter Day sermon . I am at present trying to enjoy some downtime. This may mean I get to blog, or it might not. Thanks for the follows and the comments and the responses, always appreciated.

I have been enjoying a Facebook game lately, where one is challenged to post a poem by a writer of someone else's choice - and whoever 'likes' that post is also challenged to provide a poem by an author of the poster's choice. Does that make sense? Probably not, anyway, the possibilities are endless and I have discovered some stuff by Mary Oliver and Brian Andreas (including a great Pinterest board )  that I might not have discovered otherwise.  Also on doing a search on Canadian Poets I found this below by Robert Priest - I publish with it's copyright attribution, but I don't have any ownership of it's copyright - I hope that in sharing I am not doing anything the poet would not want me to.  It's a challenging poem, and I found it here on the University of Toronto website along with lots of other great stuff. Christ Is the Kind of Guy Robert Priest From:   The Man Who Broke Out of the Letter X . Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984. C...

We're on the home stretch! I have really enjoyed revisiting these books over the past four weeks, and resolved to look out a few again, including today's offering Poems on the Underground is a very simple idea, put a selection of poetry throughout the London Underground system and let people read poetry as they travel around. When I was a student in London I used to love seeing new poems and encountering old favourites as I zipped (or crawled, depending on the time of day) around the capital. The version of this shown on the left here is not the one I own, so I don't know the exact contents, but the previous editions such as the one on the right have combined modern and classic poetry in an inspired selection. In fact it was on the tube , as we call the Underground, that I encountered for the first time Walt Whitman's poem, possibly my favourite poem but then I'm still finding out more, 'What am I after all?' which was in previous editions of poems on t...

What am I, After All? What am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over I stand apart to hear—it never tires me. To you, your name also; Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name? Walt Whitman (1819–1892) I love this poem - but like any good work of art, i couldn't explain why. Not sure whether or not this is copyright - i got it from a poster on the London Underground! If I need to acknowledge copyright or remove this please let me know.