Friday 11 January 2008

'This being human ...'

January can seem bleak. Bare trees through a veil of rain. The buds waiting to break are easily overlooked. If your landscape looks desolate, or even if you're full of optimism, here are some poems.

Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - much anthologised and quoted; Derek Walcott 's Love after Love - a gentle invitation to patience; and The Guest House by the Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi (1207 - 73) whose voice across the centuries invites us to meet life with radical acceptance.

I offer these in memory of Tony Williamson, a deeply caring and generous-hearted man, who I knew through singing together in Out Aloud, Sheffield's LGBT Choir. He died on 24th December and will be greatly missed.

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