In The Poetry

Of all the prison poems I’ve written I think this is my favourite little one. We were asked to scrub the walls of the prison to clean the place up and we saw on one wall graffiti and several prisoners refused to touch it, to scrub it out, because it was good. It was [...]

How we use the oral traditions to talk about politics, talk about love, talk about all sorts of things…

Song Of Chickens

Master, you talked with bows,
Arrows and catapults once
Your hands steaming with hawk blood
To protect your chicken.

Why do you talk with knives now,
Your hands teeming with eggshells
And hot blood from your own chicken?
Is it to impress [...]

My family and I visited the seaside in the North of England, in Bridlington, and this comes out of that visit.

The Seashells Of Bridlington North Beach
(for Mercy Angela)

She hated anything caged, fish particularly,
Fish caged in glass boxes, ponds, whatever;

‘Reminds me of prisons and slavery,’ she said;
So, when first she caught the vast green view

Of Bridlington [...]

Visiting Zomba Plateau

Could I have come back to you to wince
Under the blur of your negatives,
To sit before braziers without the glow
Of charcoal, to cringe at your rivers
That without their hippos and crocs
Merely trickle gratingly down, to watch
Dragonflies that no longer fascinate and
Puff adders that have lost their puff?
Where is your charming hyena tail -
Praying [...]