We dined on caviar
And famine in Europe
Seemed most unlikely
The world began to burn

We watched the queues lengthen
As the poor queued at foodbanks
But our Ocado deliveries
Continued nonetheless

Rebellious types protested
And journeys took longer
Really very annoying
We hoped that they’d be jailed

The news was full of Amber
And next season’s fashions
Ukraine, Yemen and Gaza
Were very far away

Life went on as normal
The monkeypox came to us
The insects died in millions
And we started then to fear

Life went on as normal
The sea levels were rising
But that is in the future?
And still the world burned

Life went on as normal
But food was more expensive
The poor were still hit hardest
And still the world burned

Life went on as normal
We began to see the die off
We still had ***** and burgers
And still the world burned

Life began change as
We knew we should have acted
Food was getting scarcer
And still the world burned
And still the world burned
And still the world burned
And still the world burned.

If I could make a heart of sheep,
Or clouds of fish in the oceans deep
If I could make a heart of fire
A heart of ice in my desire
To tell the world of all the love
That I feel soaring up above
The clouds, the ice, the fish and sheep…
They wouldn’t reach you now you sleep.

And now you sleep, and then you’ll burn
And maybe you’ll lie in an urn
Maybe I’ll scatter you on the wind
Or give you to your kith and kind
Or bury you amongst the trees
And for eternity take your ease
Your spirit flying free and light
To heaven and the infinite

I cannot say adieu to you
I need an au revoir, mon dieu
I need to know I’ll see you when
I leave this earth of fallen men
All my loved ones lining up
To pass to me the loving cup
Of love I’ve given and love I’ve had
And lives that made me whole and glad.

The house fell silent on the day he left
The house fell silent and we were bereft
No footsteps running down the stairs
(As though invaded by a troop of bears)
No hugs or kisses on top of my head
No disappearing forks or staying in bed
No surprise breakfast or cups of tea
No sudden lectures on life at sea
No rubbing my feet or hugging me quick
No clearing up when the dog’s been sick
No “I love you” or “love you too!”
The house fell silent and so did you.

We waited hoping you could survive
We wanted you awake as well as alive
But the house fell silent when you left
And then you were gone and we are bereft.

We are bereft and you are dead
We can’t remember all you said
All you said and all your love
All that life in heaven above
(You don’t believe in that we know
But we hope that heaven is where you’ll go)
All your creations and all your care
All your mess in your private lair
All your energy and all your you…
And all your loud opinions too.
The house fell silent on the day you left
Our hearts are broken; we are bereft.

Our future isn’t written in stone
It is written in the trees
In the water
In our hearts
It is ever changing and expanding
As our intentions
As our compassion
As our greed

We cannot stand apart to change it
We must cleave together
Hold one another
In our hearts
With love that never changes
Forge the future
Forge the path we hope to follow
Forge a greener destination

If we lay waste to the present
What will be left for those who follow on?
We choose life
In our hearts
Or we choose ourselves
Selfish desire or service to tomorrow
Live the change
Be the change
Or consign the future to the desert
FB 17.2.16

I remember childhood panic
My sister as a cowboy
Chasing around the garden
Bang bang, you're dead

I remember that fear today
Weeping over other people's children
Imagining their pain
Bang bang, they're dead

I want to comfort them
But there is nothing to say
Nothing to do, nothing changes
Bang bang, we're dead

Guns don't **** people, they say
People **** people, they say
But, see, they make it easy
Bang bang, they're dead
24.7.2011/8.2.2018 Fee

Lives ripped up and torn apart
Men this way and women that.
Children learning to regard starvation as normal.
And a minute for each of the victims makes
Eleven and a half years' silence.

Skull-like faces starved of food,
Starved of love, starved of light.
Bones like cartoon skeletons
Covered with a sort of skin, make
Eleven and a half years' silence.

Man's inhumanity to man,
Didn't begin with ******, nor end
It rises up and gets defeated,
Though war's a poor answer for any question - as is
Eleven and a half years' silence.

The best memorial, the best commemoration
Is not silence but shouting to be heard.
Be strong, stand up for right, for others,
For love, for compassion. Better by far than
Eleven and a half years' silence.
Fee Berry 28.1.18

A jumble of memories
A feeling of warmth
Dreamlike, escaping
I struggle to wake.

A cascade of snapshots
Darkly edged moments
A vagueness, like seeking
A word in the void.

A hypnotic gathering
Of previous faces
A channelled remembering
People who lived.

The here and the now
Are eternally mine
I cannot escape them
I cannot divine.

Live in the moment
Love in the now
Reach out for each other
And never say die.

It's raining tonight
Smearing the light down the window
as though the paint hasn't dried on the night

It's raining...
Is it raining where you are?
I can feel the rain wet upon my face...

Many miles apart
You are in your eyrie alone and asleep,
I am imagining you there, me there, us together, tonight

It's raining...
Is it raining where you are?
I am hearing the rain, in my heart

The moon, the same moon
Stares down at me, and watches over you
I take comfort from the silver moonlight falling on us both

It's raining...
Is it raining where you are?
I'm seeing the rain illuminated by the moon, sparkling underfoot

Lonely, I'm lonely
Sitting here, awake, alone... longing.
I am imagining me there, you here, us together always

It's raining...
Is it raining where you are?
I love the smell of rain in the grass at night

Can I take the step toward you,
Out into the night?
Can I take the step to another life
That may mend or break my heart?
Can I take you from your life, make you step lightly into mine?
Can I live without you still?

It's raining...
Is it raining where you are?
I can taste the rain, salt upon my tongue....

These other people
This other life
They trip to France or Italy
Or die or leave their wife

These other people
That other life
The one I might have lived
The one without the strife

Those other people
And their tidy lives
Their tidy houses
Their tidy wives

Those other people
And their messy lives
Their dead husbands
Their missing wives

I find...
The life of a famous actress
As far from my life
As those memoirs of drug runners
Or the stories from refugees
Fleeing unthinkable brutality.  

My life...
Potters on from day to day
No big tragedies
No big triumphs...
Unless a word here
And a phone call there
Could count as either.

To live and let live,
To know that my passion isn't your passion
To allow you to believe what you believe
As long as it harms no one
To do as I would be done by
And to wrestle with that question if you behave in a way that
I never would.


To love
To try to see that of God in everyone
Me and God is all that there is,
And all that there ever will be.
To try to remember that other person is God,
And if He needs my help,
To be there for him.
To be there for me too, because
Loving thy neighbour as thyself
Cuts both ways.

To forgive
To judge not, that I be not judged
Even when the culture I live in regards judgement as a skill
To forgive myself also because
Loving thy neighbour as thyself
Cuts both ways

To walk the walk and not just
Talk the talk
To live my beliefs and not just espouse them
To show light at work
Not simply to cast a shadow with it
To walk in the light and lighten it.

if i could write my heart out loud
i'd colour all my words with you
if i could only capture this
i'd seal it up inside a kiss

if you could love me half as much
as i'd love you, forgetting fear
we'd live in poverty and bliss
and i'd forget to go to work....

Hate never wins
It burns itself out on a hundred victim pyres
consuming the souls of the haters
whereas love burns eternal with the spirit light
A silver thread which knits us together
They are many, but we are one.

Love connects people
In their compassion, the knowledge of how a mother feels
When her child is taken
Lives with me, although my children are but a phone call away
I feel her pain, her loss
I want to be able to turn back time
Give those children back to their families
I don't want one to suffer as I know they are
I want to be able to hug them and say it's all right
I want to be able to step into their lives and heal it
And I can't...
But we are one, though they be many.

I can't bear to think about the sudden end
The fear, the pain, the last thoughts
I can't bear to imagine what it's like
To run for your life
I can't bear to think about the families
Learning that the goodbye they said happily
Was the last one to be said
Learning that the goodbye hug
Was the last one to be felt
and they couldn't know it.
We are one and they cannot break us.

Hate never wins
Darkness is a prelude to the light
Dawn breaks
Chasing away the night
What endures is the love,
Hate never wins,
For we are one.

Time slips by me, wearing a disguise
I don't notice him stuffing my youth into a pocket as he passes.
Time slips by me and covers my eyes with magical glasses
So I don't notice the lines arriving on my face,
only
on the faces of others.

Time slips by and takes with it my friends' children, suddenly tall
Suddenly adult, suddenly married with children of their own.
Time slips and the hours turn to days turn to weeks turn into months and it is
suddenly
eight months since I touched you, since I kissed you, since we said goodbye.

Time went past and suddenly I am old,
Peering into misty autumn days, worrying about pensions and arthritis.
Time and tide wait for no one and the truth is that there has only ever been this moment... this now...
That even as I grasp hold of it, time snatched back into the past.
Remember when your grandmother told you time flies...tempus fugit... yesterday?
Time flies, it was forty, no forty-five years ago and
seven
seemed like an age to aspire to.

Living in the moment as we all have to do has dragged you to this place, and whether all your moments spill out of time's pocket at the moment of your death and parade past you in their toe-curling glory, or whether they simply fade into the winds of eternity at your passing...
remember to live before you die, experience the moments that you have to come and
breathe
in the pleasure of living.

Tomorrow and tomorrow are unravelling from the tapestry of time,
all you can do as they pass you by and ****** your moments away is to be alert to their passing and
kiss
the ones you love.

I could have had one hundred thousand pounds by now
If I had stayed in the daily grind
Found someone else and given them my babies to mind
I could have bought them anything they wanted.

I could have had exotic holidays each year
If I had kept at the coal face
Trekked up and down the tube at a snail's pace
I could have gone anywhere I wanted.

I could have had clothes and shoes and jewels
If I had left my children at home
Left someone else holding the brush and comb
I could have worn anything I wanted.

But...
What I wanted was to feel my heart squeeze
Every time I turned and caught sight of my children
What I wanted was the joy of squidging the face paint
Even if most of it was squidged into the carpet
What I wanted was the tears and tantrums, the fears and nightmares,
and the firsts that scatter the land of childhood

If I had a million pounds by now
I couldn't buy one day in the past
The work is always there, but childhood doesn't last
The time I have had is priceless.

Will they say I lived all my life
On suburban roads
Not of the city or of the country
But a place in between
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never had to hack my arm off in extremis
Never eating anybody's cousin in desperate straits?

Like millions I struggled from one pay day to another,
Trying to stop the haemorrhage of money through the bars and pubs of the town...
Trying to keep up, to keep the income over the outgoings.
I don't care what the Joneses do.

I long for the wild places without fences or walls,
Where the birds wheel and the wind blows lustily,
Where the sound of the sea is never far away
Where the shores rustle their greeting to the waves
And the driftwood tumbles up and down the beach.

I long to run without worrying I am going to break a knee or hip,
Long for those days when I didn't know what I had, who I was, what I was going to be.
"Youth is wasted on the young," said my grandmother, and I protested, but I didn't understand
Until now
How little I appreciated my youth while I had it.

Will they say I had talent but I
Frittered it away on unfinished projects
Neither brilliant nor awful, but somewhere
in between?
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never embroidered all my lovers or
Revealed my innermost self?

Like millions, I was always writing my book, a novel or
a handbook or an autobiography.
The truth is, I started too many times, and finished
Never.

I long for a place of my own, a library
A place to keep everything that means anything
A place to watch my family on the wall, laughing and smiling
While I write or sew or research or simply read
A place for being and a place for remembering and everything in its place.

I long to write without worrying about the consequences,
Long to say what I think
A place to scour the corners of my memory, to see the pattern of my life.


Will they say, they hadn't realized I was still alive?
Will they say, I never kept in contact, which is true
I have tested my ability to live without them all
And I can.
What will they say about the person I have become?
What can I say?  I tolerated difference and saw none.
I loved the people I loved
Did the things that I did
And I am not sure what sort of future I made for myself, or what past.

I didn't know, I told my friends
I only saw the odds and ends
Littered over his garden.
I didn't know, I couldn't see
The person that he used to be
Before his confusion.
We used to call the council too
They'd charge him for the work, it's true
...though he hated them.

The blow fly problem abated for a little while.
The rats had nowhere to hide until he provided more accommodation.

I couldn't see, I told my friends
A garden full of odds and ends
Obliterated the man.
I couldn't know, I didn't see
He once was just like you and me
Before his confusion.
The council took his stuff away
It took them more than half a day
To move it.

We asked what he could possible want with second-hand garlic presses
and a pair of boy's shorts.

I didn't care, I told my friends
How many men the council sends
It will not solve it.
They'd need to know, they'd need to see
The solution's clear enough to me
He needs to go into an institution.
The council tried to talk him round
They never gained an inch of ground
He was intractable.

The junk helped him live his life
Old air conditioners and wood for healing was an unusual approach....

I didn't see, I told my friends
I hated all the odds and ends
Gathered with love.
I wouldn't know, I wouldn't see
He needed care from you and me
To cure his confusion.
The council only saw the crap
Only television saw the chap
Under the junk.

Even then, the hurts in his life were only diagnosable
Using the encrustation outside.

They left expecting ordinary days
Instead found they were going on a different sort of journey
They left their cups of coffee and unpaid bills
Stepped out of their homes and away from their lives
And can't return

Instead their souls set free today,
In darkness and confusion,
In smoke and pain,
Soared away from their broken bodies
Into a life beyond

Light a candle for their friends
and their families.
Light a candle for their children...
Their wives and mothers...
Husbands and fathers...
Light a candle for the loss

But their souls were set free today
Into a life beyond

The people in real need of light,
Of prayers and illumination
Set those bombs