If we had some bacon we could have bacon and eggs but we’ve got no eggs. That First World War catch phrase came to mind as I was contemplating an idle wish to make blackberry and apple crumble. I imagine a Bruce Bairnsfather cartoon with Old Bill and Alf or Bert grousing about the food while the whizz bangs fly…
Farm work is one of the best jobs for getting to know people as they really are. The First Job and the Sweetest Sylvia Plath’s first job was on a farm in the summer of 1950. I am grateful to the inestimable Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) for these extracts from her journal and from an article in which…
Paul Nash’s fascination with aerial bombardment led him to an ecstatic vision of “the sky blossoming with floating flowers”. This, and William Blake’s poem “Ah Sunflower”, inspired his late paintings, in which an airborne sunflower glides over imagined landscapes. Nash was seriously ill with asthma (he died of heart failure in 1946) and his growing sense of mortality is reflected…
Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. – Jawaharlal Nehru Indian Declaration of Independence, on eve of independence, August 15 1947. In celebration of the 70th anniversary of Indian…
“I was so rushed I had not time to go into the details,” – Cyril Ratcliffe. The political leaders of the independence movement in British India were unable to agree on a united post-colonial future. The result was a plan for a territorial division. The task was huge and fraught with difficulties. The consequences were traumatic. August 15th marks the…
The land army fights in the fields. It is in the fields of Britain that the most critical battle of the present war may well be fought and won. – Lady Denman, the Director of the Women’s Land Army, WW2 Who Won the War? It wasn’t the WRENS who won the war Whatever the WRENS may say It was the…
August 1914 What in our lives is burnt In the fire of this? The heart’s dear granary? The much we shall miss? Three lives hath one life – Iron, honey, gold. The gold, the honey gone – Left is the hard and cold. Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields A fair…
MCMXIV Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark; And the shut shops, the bleached Established names on the sunblinds, The farthings and sovereigns, And dark-clothed children at play…
Did you have times like these in your life? Times that you look back on with a sense of loss even though they weren’t exactly easy? Times that were tough but carefree enough that you recall them with nostalgia? Maybe you’re still living them. Diving down the back of the sofa to find the lost coins that will pay the…
The Manumit School was an experimental Christian socialist boarding school in Pawling, NY. and later Bristol, Pennsylvania. Manumit means freedom and release from slavery and this was a school with a clear mission. It was racially integrated, religiously tolerant and worked “toward a world order based upon justice and co-operation, in which the individual may find freedom.” It was founded in…
In Ivor Gurney’s nightmarish vision, the dead among the living bear dire warnings and mockery. Ballad of the Three Spectres As I went up by Ovillers In mud and water cold to the knee, There went three jeering, fleering spectres, That walked abreast and talked of me. The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier That walks the dark unfearingly;…
Some poems capture my attention because they have the twin virtues of being grounded in historical reality and yet reach for and succeed in suggesting a grander and future vision. This poem is about the arrival of the first Europeans in New Zealand. It’s about a bloody encounter and the clash of cultures. It’s a poem of heroic celebration but without…
Tweet Tweet There’s a blackbird in my mango tree and I think of Marley and singing songs of freedom I have followed birds from hills to home and back wondering where was Zion but now I am content on this verandah the blackbirds come to my mango tree and sing home is always where it’s meant to be I am…
Some culinary disasters can be repurposed. Here is Glen Baxter on polenta: And then there are times when you just have to cut your losses. Some poems just write themselves. Here is Carolyn Kizer writing – ranting and venting might be more accurate – about a Craig Claiborne recipe she tried from the NY Times. It probably didn’t help her…
Russian – American Romance In my land and yours they do hit the hay and sleep the whole night in a similar way. There’s the golden Moon with a double shine. It lightens your land and it lightens mine. At the same low price, that is for free, there’s the sunrise for you and the sunset for me. The wind…