Welcome to Forward to the Past

Welcome to this first post of Forward to the Past.

Why am I writing it? Mainly because last year I, like many others, had a wake up call. The Covid crisis brought into sharp and brutal relief the huge and growing gap between the rich and poor, the increasing pollution of the earth, the global creeping spread of extreme right, and left wing views; which are kept well fed with lies, rich in dangerous fantasy, from the ever present internet. It felt like everything was coming to a tipping point; from which there might not be a chance to go . . forward to the past. 

REPEATS October ‘19

There’s such a lot of repeats these days
We’ve seen it all before
From famine, flood and disaster
And, of course, there’s always a war

I’m lucky to live with my hubby Pete
In a far western corner of Wales
Where wildlife and sunsets make up for the beat
Of the rain on the roof and the gales

But, even down here we cannot ignore
The state of the world, especially the poor
Who, despite all the news by plentiful media
Seem to be getting increasingly needier

But soon it won’t matter
If we’ve got cash in hand
When we’ve poisoned our seas
And our once fertile land
With plastic detritus and chemical waste
There will be no advantage
For those better placed.

 

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 I can’t do marathons, or go to protests. I have enormous respect and admiration for Greta, who is using her youth and strength of character to do whatever she can to raise awareness .I have enormous hope in and for the young, who now have a global reach of communication; and are seeing and hearing for themselves that our problems are world wide . Nobody is ‘to blame’. Everybody is ‘to blame’.

 

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INDIGENOUS November 2020

We are all indigenous
Wherever foot touches this earth
We are all indigenous
Whoever’s foot touches this earth
We are all indigenous
And all of equal worth
Together we could be
Wholly indigenous; a global entity

 

 

 

 

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This blog is really for my poems, past and present. I’m in my late seventies now and feel the need to leave a reminder of my life. These days our mortality has become an ever present reality; and I feel I need to highlight, mainly poetically, what we have lost, and gained, from past events.

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THE COMPULSORY EXPERIMENT   (Written sometime in the eighties)

Think of horrendous history.
Death, torture, plague and fast.
Ponder upon their passing
If they ever are our past.
Is this freedom that we yearn for
Just freedom to complain?
The essence of true freedom
We cannot seem to gain.

See our streets; our ghetto streets;
The rubbish; the violence; our shame
In this poisoned soil we plant our seed.
Our kids with no doing, no going, no getting.
We hone youth’s blade on the hardest stone
Till, sharp with hate, frustration, anger, blame
They surge to their only exit.
The freedom of mob; the strength of idleness.
The skills of steal and run.
Fast spreads the canker
And the more uneasy we become.
As on and on they go; stepping out of line.
While the muttering against them in the suburbs grows
At their temerity to react at all.

But history does repeat itself; it’s true
Humanity can’t grow
With it’s back against the wall.
It can only kick and run.
Brute power is all the mob has
As against their torments they turn
Blindly facing their nemesis
In a maze of elusive freedom;
In a cage with invisible bars
That they cannot find to break.
The compulsory experiment
We don’t know how to stop.

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No change there then. But climate change is not going away. And humanity worldwide is going to have to deal with it. Lets hope that we can learn from our past mistakes.

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I’m looking . . .  Forward to the past  July ’21

At our garden; full of plants
Plants that were here, in the wild, before us
Plants transported from previous gardens
Plants given by friends
Shrubs, flowers, cuttings and seeds
Beautiful roses; reminders of the givers
And trees; many we have grown
Plants appearing from we know not where
Plants that we have sown
This precious patch has been designed to last
By nature; and by us
A living history of our past