Poetry

POETRY:
I have written quite a lot of poetry. It comes 'through' me, rather than coming as a conscious thought, to order. Over the years, some of these poems have been published in newspapers; some have been entered in competitions (one won a prize - a 'Quaire'); some of the poems are very personal; some have been written as a reaction to public events. There are some samples of my poetry available on this website:

Various Lives: Over the years, I have connected with what might (pretentiously) be called "past lives". They are written as stanzas in an extended poem: more "as if" I had lived there and then, rather than evidence that I did. I offer you these stanzas, these lives, as a PDF file, here.
As an addition, when visiting Athens, another stanza came to me. However it doesn't fit with the meter of the others, so it stands alone as "Agora Agony". There are a couple of other poems of that type as well. I had another 're-incarnational' experience when I visited Lhasa in Tibet, in 2008: but that poem hasn't come through yet.

Marathon: In October 2004, I attended a Body-Psychotherapy conference in Marathonas (Marathon) near Athens, Greece. We were on the same beach where, almost 2,500 years previously, a Persian fleet had landed, seriously threatening the newly formed democracy of the city-state of Athens, about 26 miles away.
These poems came as I also explored the history of the battle, the struggle for democracy that we are still facing today, and the events around the epic run of Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens. For a lengthy history, and then the four 'Marathon' poems, as a PDF file, click here.

9/11: As a personal reaction to the events of September 11th 2001, I was on my way to a psychotherapy conference in Egmont am Zee, near Amsterdam, when the news of the events broke. Over the next few days, I was semi-transfixed in front of the TV watching CNN, like millions of others. This poem is my reaction a few months later, when I could write poetry again.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: I attended a mini-conference on psychodynamic psychotherapy (in Lubljana, Slovenia, Oct 2004) and wrote a couple of poems. The first was read out at the end of the conference, the second (that follows on the next page) was an afterthought.

Other Poems: Wow! There's a lot!
There are some poems that have come directly out of psychotherapy sessions: poems about Childhood Abuse: "Behind Closed Doors" and "Fear the Stranger".
There are several poems about my own personal process: "How do I touch you?" and "The Bardos of Death"; and then there many others.

There is a mini-series of four poems about trees "Ode to a Tree", "Redwoods", "How do I make a tree?" and "Yes". These are but diverse samples.

There is a whole collection of poems about the Findhorn River (see below); a collection of poems deriving from a workshop with Thich Naht Hahn (not on-line yet); and one from one Easter event at Findhorn with Joanna Macey (also not on-line yet); a collection of poems about Nature (see below); a collection of poems about Love and Loss (see below); and a collection of poems about oppression and power (also see below: some of them quite dark): This collection contains "The Disappeared" and"Bringers of Death").

There are also another couple of ecological poems: Mother's Anger and Some experimental thoughts of a plague virus searching for enlightenment. These also appear in the collections below.

Then some individual poems about Scottish history (this one, 'The Military Road' even won a prize); a humourous poem about toilets "Privy Thoughts"; a sort of presentational essay about McGonegal, "Very Bad Poetry"; a poem written to my wife's cat Twyla (that had to be left behind in Texas); a poem about the death of a young man, Curdie, who was very close to me; a poem written about a childhood experience with a Snake in Singapore; and many more. The list goes on.

Not all of them are available yet, but I have started uploading some of the earlier "Collections":