A blog about anything and everything…
I have had a poem published in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025
This is the first online publication by The Chaos Section Poetry Project and they selected my poem “Ubuntu”. Merril D Smith and Melissa Lemay, both of dVerse Poets Pub also have poems in the publication…
When the last redneck Republican
realises his true enemy
and stirs with his Democrat neighbour
the great melting pot of
red and blue to an unroyal purple
When an eighty-year-old
Israeli and Palestinian
jointly place the last skull in the
Nakba-Holocaust Ossiary Memorial
and agree to share a country
When single use plastic is abhorred
and the use of oil for
virgin plastic rationed
and whole towns comb their beach
for plastic to recycle
When the last billionaire
gives away his last coin
to the last poor person
weeping as he is
buoyed by sheer relief
When global warming is stabilised
and the last bird species
threatened with extinction
breeds the first nest of
the rest of their species
When the last petrol head
learns to love the glint of
sunlight on windmill blades
and drives off in a small electric car
which is no fashion or status symbol
When the last piece of
the fractured world
is fitted into place – fastened
with a seam of shining gold
and balanced once again
When…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Mish in Poetics invites us to write about “Building from the Broken” which could be a reference to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which a broken piece of porcelain is mended with a glue containing powdered gold resulting in a new and enhanced aesthetic…
Driving home along City Road
an ambulance dashes by
with” blues and twos”
screaming its way towards the hospital
– do we all wonder whether
its cargo is of death or life
another human being on the way out
or a baby on the brink of being born?
Does anybody learn indifference
to this question of “for whom the bell tolls?”
The blue lights illuminate the faces and bare arms
of the sex workers leaning against
the old warehouse building – soon to be apartments
and if they were looking for their veins
right now, they wouldn’t find them
but that will come later…
One girl lurches across the pavement
as a familiar car pulls up
and as she departs, another slips
into pole position, eyes peeled…
A few hours earlier, or come tomorrow
this street junction will belong
to office workers or shopgirls
some in the sanctity of hair concealing hijab
with no knowledge of their having
traversed the red light district
of another temporal place.
The patient in the ambulance
will hopefully be settled in a bed
recovering, or perhaps a bed
beside a cot with mother and baby
also recovering, and adjusting
to the new place, respectively.
At home I make two suppers
to meet our different needs
– one soft and forgiving on dentures
that no longer fit well and tastebuds
stripped of efficacy by smoking
secondly the most creative that
cooking for one can get
and I remember cooking for different
tastes in our early reconstructed family
– one diabetic, one vegetarian
two for meat and two veg, and the two of us
then just wanting something interesting to eat…
Now only Christmas dinner brings
the whole family together and still
there are different varied requirements
to further complicate that logistical nightmare
but catering to all is the measure of care…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian in Live, OpenLinkNight, invites us to post a poem of our choice and hopefully read it at the live session.
This poem references a time when I lived in the centre of Bradford, and unwittingly (since I viewed it in the daytime) lived in an apartment adjacent to the heart of the red light district, also a busy route to the Bradford Royal Infirmary and rarely, I still traverse this road on my way home, to my present address…
I
Olive skin
Dark brown honey trap eyes
Black hair wiry as desert weed
II
No beauty
Prickly as cactus
Dangerous as opioid poison
III
Sky blue eyes
Generous with loving
But with an invisible minefield
But yours was
The soil in which I grew
Patiently uncovering each mine
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write a poem in the Parallelogram de Crystalline form which consists of –
• 12 lines in total (each Capitalised but without punctuation)
• 4 verses
• 3 lines per verse
• syllable count per verse 3,6,9
• unrhymed
And for the theme of the poem: the beauty of a (real or imaginary) lover as compared with and described in images of nature.
Our first bedroom
was a work of art
where I bought my
profession and my painting to bear
like a Bower Bird building a nest to
attract and cement
a relationship with a mate.
I always preferred to make
my own Valentine cards
Christmas and birthday offerings
and even the gifts if possible
and that room was my gift to you
– on the ceiling a giant Chinese
prawn painted paper parasol
which I surprised you with
on a date in London and as
we walked, giddy along Oxford Street
we gathered a crowd of people
seeking shelter from the torrential rain
the painted prawns in their element
stopped from swimming off only by varnish.
The wall at the head of the bed
swam with myriad shoals of
tiny fishes gleaming like Neon Tetras
where I over sprayed the stencil
with spatters of silver
and the other wall moved subtly
from undersea azure to
misty morning blue
where an undergrowth of
real plants pressed and stencilled
emerged from the mist
at the foot of the wall
a perpetual daybreak to
greet us each morning.
I will not say that
all our intimacies took
place in that love nest
for in those days, any room
would do for us before
the clouds settled down on us
dampening ardour except for
brilliant sunbeams occasionally
breaking through
that bedroom was always but
our happy place
beneath the prawns
amongst the fishes
and flowering weeds
of late summer.
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invetes us to “write a poem that conjures a view (whether from our travels or everyday life, whether from desire or experience) that is colored by the emotion of the moment“
Krisis does not always come with a bang
a storm heralded by a clap of thunder
or even a whimper, a cry for help
krisis can come like a big cat
creeping, camouflaged the colour of
golden grass until so close to it’s prey
escape is impossible
Pity the partner who too, close by has
failed to spot the marauder
– to sound the alarm until too late
and krisis has sprung, jaws locked on
to suffocate – flight impossible, frozen still
For something that arrives so quietly
depression nevertheless rules the roost
changes more lives than the victim’s
spreads it’s blight to partners
children, siblings, friends
and moments of freedom
are hard won – the result
of planning, cajoling
caring persuasion
and often a short reprieve
results in a reactive tightening
of the snare that binds
– would have the victim
knaw off their own leg
if only they had the energy
The only hope – to roll back the
malaise in the same way it came
a single step at a time
hoping a habit will take hold
and the novel become the norm
once more…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, paeansunplugged in Poetics asks us to “write a poem about any pivotal moment in your life that left you with gnawing regrets or you could cover the entire gamut from anger to forgiveness and reconciliation. In short, you will be writing about a krisis in your personal life.”
My mother fought in the war, not hand to hand of course, but she ran the switchboard at the underground fortress on the Isle of Portland where the D-Day invasion was planned. She was a target of a spiteful fighter who strafed her landlady’s garden and had to dive under the hedge with the children. She alerted her base to a spy who was subsequently caught and she said there were six men, any one of which she might have married if they had not gone off to fight and never came back. Her tears on Remembrance Day taught us to tear up…
each Autumn brought tears
of Remembrance for lost loves
fallen in the war
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Frank J. Tassone in Haibun Monday, invites us, on America’s Memorial Day, when those who have fallen in service of their country are remembered, to write a a Haibun recalling those whom we lost. This is about my mther’s Remembrance but from her example, we learned the meaning of loss and the response of tears.
I wrote a longer poem about Remembrance and an exploration of my mother’s story in the memoir I wrote in this year’s A to Z Challenge here.
Since January this year, my friend Melissa Lemay, has been publishing her online journal Collaborature. As the name implies, it is a place for collaborative writing and other forms of creativity to thrive. You can find out more about Collaborature and how to submit work here.
Melissa also interviews some of her contributors and I was recently the subject of just such an interview. Amongst the many things we talked about, was our own collaborative project in which we are writing an epic saga called Shipmates. It was inspired by “The Golden Gate”, a novel by Vikram Seth, written entirely in sonnet form in the 1970s. He, in turn, was inspired by Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin”, though I only found that out well into the project. We don’t know how far this project will carry on – it will publish in chapters, mostly around seven sonnets each, every two weeks. There follows, the first two verses of Chapter 1…
Whale Struck and Love Struck
1:1
Mid-ocean is a lonely place
But some seek there to sail
The Pacific is the greatest space
But not to run into a whale
As Kate found snoozing in her bunk
She woke to find her whole world sunk
With barely time to don Mae West
And swim out leaving all the rest
Before her precious yacht and home
Dove downwards to Pacific deep
Kate left ringed with flotsam and foam
She searches but finds nought to keep
Some way off the whale’s spout she espies
And though a tough cookie, Kate just cries…
1:2
Alas, the salt, it dries her skin
And oil it overcompensates
Causing blotches, discoloration
And what of it if true love waits
O’er yonder past the waterspout?
She thinks perhaps a whale to mount
Could be an achievable task
Should she calculate around the blast
Choose wisely time to take the reins
Lest end up shot to Port of Spain
Though, admittedly wouldn’t be so bad
A holiday in the Caribbean
Kate snaps back to reality
In just the nick of time to see…
Walking back along the ledges
from a fruitless fishing expedition
fruitless but for the pleasure
of sunshine on tons of lazy swelling
clear Atlantic water
shifting glassy at my feet
– I encountered an otter.
Seeing me first it fled
across my path and
slipped into the sea
I searched the swells for it
and when our eyes met – it dived again.
We played this game several times
until I turned the tables
– dropping to my knees I crawled
crouched low over the serpent stone
snake fashion for ten yards until
carefully lifting my head
I saw the otter now searching for me!
We could have played all day
but the knobbly fossils of solitary corral
were hard on my knees
and so we parted with
a final interspecies gamers salute!
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Lisa or Li in Poetics, invites us to write a poem about an intimate moment. This encounter with the “other”, a sea-otter, on the West coast of Ireland where I lived for ten years, took place on ledges of “serpent stone” fossil solitary corals, solitary corals that with horizontally across the plane of the rocks…
What if we approached the authoritarians
who have asserted themselves
around the world – with compassion?
Perhaps Putin suffers from Napolean
Complex – the plight of small men
and yearning for the late, great days
when he fought metaphorical rats
in dark corners with the KGB
Was he stunted by the starvation
that took his brother, is that why
he cannot have enough of everything?
He is the Strong Man, bare-chested
on horseback projecting his lost
glory days onto his country and trying
to obliterate a country that was there
when Muscovy was just a swamp
– is that what it will take
to make him feel better?
Has Trump really found a friend
who understands his needs
facilitated his election – twice
or is Putin playing him for a patsy
to suit his own purposes?
Did being born with a silver spoon
in his mouth – paid $20,000 a year
by his father, a millionaire by age eight
set impossible expectations that
made a seedbed for hubris and
underhand shortcuts in the attempt
to make the grade?
In bed with a somewhat Mafia connected Cohn
– another avuncular mentor
who gave him a love of litigation
was Trump needing more of a father’s
love than he could possibly find
in reality – is that why he turned
to reality TV and ultimately to presidency?
Post colonially
India seemed like a beacon of
spiritual inclusion, diversity and equality
with its mixture of religions
living side by side
for the most part, peacefully
but Modi promoted Nationalism
but only for Hindus, Moslems
don’t belong – old hatreds
once more resurrected
in the service of party political
power and concomitant
self-aggrandisement.
Was it being born into a background
of Other Backward Class
as his neighbourhood was classified
or serving tea to haughty strangers
on the station platform with his father
that made Modi aspire to climb so high?
What shame did he bear for denying
his marriage to become a pracharak
in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
a leg-up the social ladder
for which celibacy was a requirement?
How many people have to die in
religious pogroms to wash away
the scars of humble origin?
And in another place riven
with religious but not racial
differences, one Semitic people
try to delete another
– to take their place
by God given right, they claim
led by a man terrified to
lose it all, the power, the respect
on account of personal corruption
– the prison that awaits him if
he lets go for a moment
of the extreme nationalist narrative
that keeps his country behind him
even though they slide ever downwards
in the eyes of the world
I don’t know about Orban
or President Xi, but
what are the chances that these other
strong men have a weakness within
that drives their story?
We can react with anger, horror
disbelief, to the authoritarian
network that has overtaken
the global village of recent decades
even with all its village quarrels
and sometimes worse
it was better than this divisive
hate filled place we now find
ourselves thrust into
– but where will it get us?
What if we all wrote to
the strong men and spoke
to their hearts with
understanding
of their personal pasts
their fears and disappointments?
Would a million letters each
be enough to salve them
with a democracy of love?
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in OpenLinkNight, invites us to post a poem of our choice which can also be read out on the OLN live meeting on Saturday…
This poem attempts to look at current events from a slightly different angle…