These dark drear days can be hard to endure. Many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Winter is hard on all living things, especially once festive holidays are over and the long hard slog towards spring begins.

In the spirit of sharing and the joys of simple pleasures, I offer these tips to get us through the dark days.

1. Read some poetry. Anthologies like Deborah Alma’s ‘The Everyday Poet’ (Michael Marra), Daisy Goodwin’s ‘Poems to Last a Lifetime’ (Picador), The Candlestick Press pamphlet anthologies on different themes and only £4.95 apiece, and Bloodaxe’s Being Human, are great things to dip into. A poem a day keeps the sadness away.
2. Fire and light are important parts of all winter festivals. A real hearth fire or logburner is a boost, and even the humble gas fire has a flame. Burn a scented candle for easy access to flame, and the scent will…

I was in the chandler’s the first time it happened.
I’d gone in to buy a cleat, so while the staff were busy
I cruised round the aisles. The lad with the ginger hair,
the one who knows the tide tables and the weather forecast,
was helping a father and daughter choose a life-preserver.
The ones they’d already tried lay scattered round their feet,
discarded, like those abandoned across Greek beaches.
And as the child bounced between the shelves,
the orange jacket tied snugly around her small body,
I saw her bobbing away from the boat, her mother
calling her name, weeping into the salt water.
Now it happens all the time: in the street,
in the supermarket, in the school playground.
I see children, even the lucky ones in life-jackets,
drifting just out of reach, swallowed up by the sea,
bone-chilled, to be washed up on some distant shore.

November 15, 2016

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
excerpt “what they did yesterday afternoon” by Warsan Shire

In our themed section this month our writers explore acts of kindness that are motivated by love (respect) as expressed to neighbors, to self and for the peoples of the world and the environment.

London-based Somali writer Warsan Shire’s poem above makes a powerful statement about the world today. Our writers define some of the issues, express their pain and encourage right action. They move from a hip-hop poem calling us to unity, collaboration and a sense of self-worth to an experimental expression of sadness and disillusionment in the aftermath of a mean-spirited presidential campaign and the inclusion of an impassioned piece asking us to stand against moral injustice and not use our cultural differences as an excuse to hate.

You’ll find…

Djinns in the Aleppo Souks

Catch the djinns between the piles of giddy spices
In air shot through with bolts of light
Blasted diagonally through the dust and dark
Into the barter of bargain goods of the Levant
To the haggling crowds of everyday Arab merchants
Muttering, shouting in there, in the labyrinth.   

Anciently concealed in shops and booths in the labyrinth
Blazed with tawny, azure, brown, and golden bright spices
Dealt by commercial domestic merchants
Like their goods veiled from the blistering light
And blinding heat of the shapeshifting Levant
Shuttered cluttered there in the dark

The blasted roof of corrugated tin welds in the dark
Traced with cash threading through the labyrinth
Intersecting algebraic values of the Levant
Mediterranean oil, sea-salt and camel caravanserai spices
Emulsified on counters under jaundiced electric light
By gold like the teeth in hospitable merchants

Accommodating demanding hosts querulous merchants
their eyes…

This is the second posting on a metrical exercise on iambics. I have been teaching 3 sessions for the Poetry School in the last few weeks, contributing to the ongoing course called The Construction of the Poem which takes students through the various constituent elements that go to make up a poem. It is advertised as on ‘the history and application of formal techniques’ and my brief is to cover metrical issues. Though the course is directed more at learning about such techniques than the application of them (this is partly just a matter of time restrictions), one exercise we have played around with is growing our own iambics – this began with an iambic monometer and grew into an iambic tetrameter as detailed in my previous posting.

Starting from the tetrameter again, the poem will now grow some more . . . This is where I got to…

The train manager requests two minutes silence
as benevolent morning sun touches
middle England’s fields with gilt
while across the Channel, the Somme’s
sweet rolling hills are healing over
despite zig-zag trenches and craters
where paper poppies decay and fall
like blood-stained confetti.

On Grammar Schools

In 1966, my class was told we were going to do a test. I think we had a good idea what it was for. It tested three types of intelligence, though I later found out there were a lot more. Later, we had letters from the local authority, telling us we had passed – a total of six, out of the 56 girls in our year. I was very relieved, because I’d heard the local secondary modern was ‘rough’, and as a kid with specs who always had her nose in her book and was terrible at sports, I knew I’d be on the receiving end of some nastiness. So thankfully, I set off for grammar school, in a city 12 miles away from my home town, with a briefcase and a tie, feeling like the world was at my feet.

Even at 11, I felt the…