Arts Articles
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Oblivion
Enjoying the humour I sit to one side Until your approach, feeling Warm inside I take your hand And feel the world fall away Around me. -
Around the world…
South Korea The flag of South Korea | Wikimedia Commons Ninety per cent of the world’s imprisoned conscientious objectors are in South Korea. Since 1950, 16,296 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been sentenced to a total of 31,204 years’ imprisonment for refusing to perform military service. In recent years they have been…
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Once upon a [war] time
At Yearly Meeting Gathering, Friends revisited the Peace Testimony, 350 years on, and asked themselves, ‘Do you stand up for Peace, use your voice, try to discern what action you can take?’ One Friend who used his very distinctive voice to stand up for peace is being celebrated, this year…
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Making the Quaker connection
‘Language bursts out of the silence. Creation emerges out of the void.’ Quaker writer and poet Sibyl Ruth penned these words in her script for a recent BBC Radio 4 programme on Quakers and poetry. She reflects on her experience of making the programme. I used to organise poetry readings.…
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Curmudgeonly sonnet at YMG
More humility, please. For we did not ‘Abolish slavery’. The record also shows How slaves at fearful cost themselves arose To fight, forgive, and change the global plot. -
The other pilgrim
A Quaker was there also, as ye wistė That I had almost forgot from my listė So silent was he – when that it was Sunday, But talkėd more than any by the Monday. -
Quaker silhouettes
Portraits of early Quakers are extremely rare. One of the reasons for this was strictly practical – most Friends did not come from the social class that could afford painted portraits. However, there were also serious religious objections to images of all kinds. Early Quakers shared with other nonconformist religious…_by_Metford2.jpg)
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Whither Next?
We train them to fire bullets that we have sold them And wonder why they kill the rioting crowd. -
Art in the Society
A woman turns, her arms flung high, her body twisting in the movement of the dance. She is vulnerable, naked to the light, and energized. She seems to move with the power of the moment, and yet she does not move at all. She is frozen in time, a sculpture…
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Gemini poets
It must have been during 1971 that I noticed that, like myself, four of my fellow students at Cambridge (all of them engaged, as it happened, in theological studies) wrote poetry and had birthdays in June. Together in 1972 we published The Gemini Poets and then, in 1974, Gemini Twin.…
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