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Joseph Sinclair Oct 2014
I recall myself growing
inside her,
moving and reaching and
sliding, slithering,
straining against
any explosion of feeling.

I remember the sharing
of tumescent desire;
the transition from
connection
of mouth and breast
to thigh and ****.

I remember, I recall . . .
and that is all that’s left;
the memory,
the recollection,
the evocation
of joys long gone.

Alas
the sands run out.
Nothing now remains
but odium,
loathsome,
vile.

I’d had my way
back in the day,
but this, oh this
it must be said:
I’d left her
in a loveless bed.
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2019
Do not judge
my conclusions
before you have tested
my premisses.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
Oven's just been cleaned
Next week's my operation
I too will sparkle
Joseph Sinclair Oct 2014
Voltaire said
if god did not exist he would have to be invented.
But god does not exist,
except in my imagination.
Therefore I have invented him.

And according to Montesquieu,
if I were a triangle
my god would have three sides.

But god is of my mind
and thus . . .
god is me, and
I am god.

*quod erat demonstrandum
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2019
Forgive me
the rage of youth,
the senseless
towering frenzy
of childish
interception.
the malignity
of immaturity
Now that I am
old enough.
Old enough to be dying
with dignity.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2017
Random thoughts occur to me in poetic meter.
I tend to write my poetry like the childhood pastime
of connecting up dots
until those random thoughts coalesce
into my latest piece of verse.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2022
You burned
Like the brightest of bright flames
And,
as is always the case
with bright flames,
you were snuffed out.
Early.
Far, far too early.
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2022
What does the mirror show
When I move away?
How can I be sure that my
Reflection moves away with me?
If not, then the next viewer
Will see my face
And not their own.
How terrifying!
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2022
If only it were possible
To hold a mirror to my mind
And try to ascertain
If the image it portrays
Is true or a distortion.
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2015
Morning came.
The sun, though wanly yet,
From out the clouds did creep,
And chilled but more the coldness in each heart.

Night had passed.
Their craft its course had set;
They roused themselves from sleep,
Despairingly aware this was the start.

*
And then within their ******* a wondrous joy:
“We are alive. Our pained heartbeat
Is Freedom’s precious blood;
Though fugitive, we plant our feet
On this uncertain road.
Reprieve, we pray, these victims of Hanoi.”

But what inexorable dream did drive
Them to this pass? Utopia . . .?
Can desperation so
Produce a mass myopia?
Or did they simply show
A crass and rude desire to stay alive?

Freedom they sought and yet from freedom fled;
Their sorrow spent, alike their gold,
(Why give up gold for strife?)
Bewilderment assailed the old,
The rest were for their life
Content, who measured wealth by rice and bread.

This is no refuge for the older men.
Here Mammon reigns. Who dares offend
Its promissory trap?
The tree retains a bitter blend
That yet within its sap
Contains the best of threescore years and ten.

No sanctuary this; no lotus land
With blossoms sweet. Another scent
The fragrant harbour bears.
Its airs defeat their loud lament
And gives voice to their fears:
Retreat or here remain to make a stand.

Accumulated wealth; decay of man;
The evidence is all around:
This is cold comfort farm.
No penitents do here abound;
No charity; no charm.
“Dispense with it” some said “and change our plan.”

But still they stayed, and still more of them came
In constant hope: some few sanguine,
Some cynical, some scared;
The misanthrope and the benign,
Each really ill-prepared
To cope, alas, when menaced tongues declaim:

“You are not wanted here! You have no right
Our aims to thwart. We have our own
Philosophy to fill
An empty heart. Leave us alone
To line our pockets still.
Depart! Desist! This scene offends our sight.”

And whither shall they go when doors are locked
to them and barred? Another land?
Another sea serene
Yet still as hard? Forever banned;
Regarded as obscene;
Ill-starred, kept out, each avenue but blocked.

The days lay heavy on them, and the weeks
Marked mournful time; and endless nights
Of sleepless hours compose
No rest sublime. But lawful rights
And liberties opposed
By crime whose legal putrefaction reeks.

Pity those huddled masses in their hive
Of human pain. What choice had they
Beyond their selfish dream
To hope again? Perhaps to pray,
Or, with a piteous scream,
Complain once more: “We merely want to live!”

Was it not ever so, since the first dawn?
Did not our Lord (perchance, too, theirs)
Enjoy the same disdain?
(The same reward?) For what compares
With crucifix and pain
Of sword and scourge, save that one is reborn.

*

Winter brought
Another wakening day;
The menace of that dream:
Demoralizing symbol of their fears.

In the Spring
The well-tide of their gay
And sacrificial stream:
The flower must die before the fruit appears.
The news of the hideous and horribly gruesome deaths of all those men, women and children in a refrigerated truck abandoned on an Austrian highway moved me to writing a poem about the inhumanity of our behaviour towards people whose only crime is that they want to live, and live a life of hope rather than one of despair. And then I suddenly realised that I had already written that poem, in 1979, when living in Hong Kong to which unwelcome haven streamed all those refugees from Vietnam, unglamorously known as The Boat People. The names and places may have been changed, but the substance remains just as it was written 36 years ago, and published in my book of verse: Uncultured Pearls:

I called it REFUGE:
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2015
He did not upon the coffin place a wreath,
to do so, he felt, would have been obscene.
His wreath, instead, was just a metaphor
to symbolise the life that once had been;
a memorial to spirit that remained
and not a talisman of something pre-ordained.

The years had been filled with inconstant strife
to enter the parnassus of an exalted life
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2017
We believe that by identifying symptoms
we will succeed in curing cause.
But the name is as little the origin
as the menu is the meal.
We need to seek the source,
the mainspring of our malady.

A cure may be
as elusive as the alchemist’s gold,
or the scientist’s discovery
of a perpetual motion machine.

But
to **** the ****
we must locate the root.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
How she despised the scent of worthless lying,
Aroma of a thousand wretched, wasted days
Of anguish at the prospect of love’s dying
Last embrace before the vast displays
Of bitterness that’s death-defying.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2022
The lies of Boris born
Were sent to mock us.
They fed us milk of Capricorn
And not the lactococcus.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
Sometimes it is enough
To travel to the dentist
And lose your toothache
Before you’ve gone a hundred yards.

Or plan a visit to the doctor
And find that stomach pain
Has all but disappeared
Before you leave the house.

But I could travel to your side
With passion burning in my heart
A million times
And never lose my love for you.
Joseph Sinclair Oct 2014
By John Reed

To Lincoln Steffens


SOMEWHERE I read a strange, old, rusty tale
Smelling of war; most curiously named
The Mad Recreant Knight of the West.
Once, you have read, the round world brimmed with hate,
Stirred and revolted, flashed unceasingly         
Facets of cruel splendor. And the strong
Harried the weak …
                    Long past, long past, praise God,
In these fair, peaceful, happy days.

                            The Tale:         
      Eastward the Huns break border,
        Surf on a rotten ****;
      They have murdered the Eastern Warder
        (His head on a pike).
      “Arm thee, arm thee, my father!         
        Swift rides the Goddes-bane,
      And the high nobles gather
        On the plain!”

      “O blind world-wrath!” cried Sangar,
        “Greatly I killed in youth;         
      I dreamed men had done with anger
        Through Goddes truth!”
      Smiled the boy then in faint scorn,
        Hard with the battle-thrill;
      “Arm thee, loud calls the war-horn         
        And shrill!”

      He has bowed to the voice stentorian,
        Sick with thought of the grave—
      He has called for his battered motion
        And his scarred glaive.         
      On the boy’s helm a glove
        Of the Duke’s daughter—
      In his eyes splendor of love
        And slaughter.

      Hideous the *** advances         
        Like a sea-tide on sand;
      Unyielding, the haughty lances
        Make dauntless stand.
      And ever amid the clangor,
        Butchering *** and ***,         
      With sorrowful face rides Sangar
        And his son….

      Broken is the wild invader
        (Sullied, the whole world’s fountains);
      They have penned the murderous raider         
        With his back to the mountains.
      Yet though what had been mead
        Is now a ****** lake,
      Still drink swords where men bleed,
        Nor slake.         

      Now leaps one into the press—
        The hell ’twixt front and front—
      Sangar, ****** and torn of dress
        (He has borne the brunt).
      “Hold!” cries, “Peace! God’s peace!         
        Heed ye what Christus says—”
      And the wild battle gave surcease
        In amaze.

      “When will ye cast out hate?
        Brothers—my mad, mad brothers—         
      Mercy, ere it be too late,
        These are sons of your mothers.
      For sake of Him who died on Tree,
        Who of all creatures, loved the least—”
      “Blasphemer! God of Battles, He!”         
        Cried a priest.

      “Peace!” and with his two hands
        Has broken in twain his glaive.
      Weaponless, smiling he stands—
        (Coward or brave?)         
      “Traitor!” howls one rank, “Think ye
        The *** be our brother?”
      And “Fear we to die, craven, think ye?”
        The other.

      Then sprang his son to his side,         
        His lips with slaver were wet,
      For he had felt how men died
        And was lustful yet;
      (On his bent helm a glove
        Of the Duke’s daughter,         
      In his eyes splendor of love
        And slaughter)—

      Shouting, “Father no more of mine!
        Shameful old man—abhorr’d,
      First traitor of all our line!”         
        Up the two-handed sword.
      He smote—fell Sangar—and then
        Screaming, red, the boy ran
      Straight at the foe, and again
        Hell began….         

Oh, there was joy in Heaven when Sangar came.
Sweet Mary wept, and bathed and bound his wounds,
And God the Father healed him of despair,
And Jesus gripped his hand, and laughed and laughed….
This is intended to be included in the collection entitled Cultured Pearls which is to be devoted to poetry by poets other than myself that has had some special meaning for me.
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2019
I have always been mad.
It is a condition
I have learned
to live with.

Yesterday however
I had a moment
of pure sanity.

It scared me.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
Self-delusion can’t get any worse
than passing off as poetry
what is no more than verse.
Joseph Sinclair Oct 2016
There were so many superstars
Conducting somber seminars
And I’ve attended many in my time.

And they seemed to take for granted
We could only be enchanted;
That their facilitation is sublime

And since those presentations are
Now displaced by the webinar
Their pedagogic hubris is enlarged.

And they can add computer skill
To their old-fashioned power drill
Engagement thus is positively charged.

And we still can choose to slumber
Through a course no longer somber
The internet will simply intercede

So gird your ***** and drop your guard
Send reverence to the graveyard;
The superstar is an endangered breed
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2017
When I share my feelings
I feel closer to you
But I also
feel closer to me.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2020
There they lie;
spread around me
a myriad shining fragments
of the gift she had brought me.
Shards of glass
each a reflection of a broken promise;
a gift procured but withheld.

And all that I can do
is to survey those shattered remnants
of unrequited dreams,
and replay them on an endless
reel of soundless, aimless,
misbegotten promises
that ***** my heart
as those metaphorical shards
might have pricked my fingers.

What is left to me now
but to weep?
Joseph Sinclair Oct 2017
Some there are who move through life
without creating a ripple
on the surface of any other person’s
existence.

Some there are who burn themselves out
with an excessive expenditure of energy.

But she . . .
she touched so many lives
she enriched so many others
she displayed so many talents.

My soul reached out to hers
caressed the chilled alabaster of her face
enfolded her in its embrace,
timelessly spreading its
tentacled grip,
at odds with the chilled alabaster of my heart.

And now she has moved on
and soon it will be time for me to follow.
Joseph Sinclair Apr 2019
She wore her heart upon her sleeve
displayed, though vaguely risible,
with no intention to deceive,
her love spilled out naively visible.

The path was dark
hushed were the twitters of her belovèd birds.
Silent dove and muted lark.
She wore her heart upon her sleeve,
and unheard were her dying words:
“I believe”.
Joseph Sinclair Jan 2022
Of all our fellow creatures
We really have to say
That the best are not the preachers
But those who light the way.
Joseph Sinclair Apr 2022
If words are inadequate,
enjoy the bliss of silence.
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2023
I can sympathize with pain but not with pleasure.
There are those who prefer suffering to sympathy;
Who would exchange solace for sensuality.
It is not my wish to offer them a choice

I seek to bring you comfort;
To bring you to a resting place.
But will I bring solace to myself?
Will I find a refuge?

And if not me, then who?
And if not here, then where?
And if not now, then when?
This is no recipe for scant solace.
Joseph Sinclair Mar 2022
I have lived in interesting times
I have endured many different climes
Much of my life has been bizarre
But now, calling me from afar,
I begin to hear those compelling chimes
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2022
A mournful
Waterfall
Of sound
A gentle
Susurration.

A sad cascade
Reverberates
In timeless
Melody
And tuneless
Tempo.

Disturbs
My soul
And disconcerts
My spirit.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
My lovely daughter Emily
is fighting for her life.
She may not be aware of it
beneath the surgeon’s knife,
admitting of a doubt
for her is never rife.

I wish I might have half as much
courage in my own
meagre confrontations with
the symptoms that I’ve grown
accustomed to and which
are vastly overblown.
I had to get this down on paper in order to handle the over-pressing concerns that I'm trying to deal with.  Your prayers and good wishes for Emily's recovery from the SCT procedure conducted today are besought.
Joseph Sinclair Aug 2019
I am the difference that
shelters the difference;
I am the hope to
nourish the heart;
I am the truth that
lights up the darkness,
And causes all fear to depart.
Joseph Sinclair May 2022
Don't tell me I've time
When we both know full well
It's time that has me!
Joseph Sinclair Mar 2022
I was born wise
and have spent the better part of a century
trying to constrain
buffoonery.
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2017
My body has long surpassed
its use-by date
But despite so many
gloomy predictions
I believe its best-before date
is yet to come.
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2017
It’s all right
to admit my blame.
It serves
no useful purpose
to deny
and not confess
my complicity
in your distress.

The greatest gift
I can bestow
is to listen
to your words.
To still the idle chatter
of my brain
and take on board
your clear-cut pain.

It does not make me
weak to face
my weaknesses.
It brings me
close to you,
perhaps emotional,
well that’s fine too.

Bless you for
being with me
while I unburden
my heart.
It’s good to know
that you still care,
so thanks for letting
me share.
Joseph Sinclair Apr 2015
They **** us up, the kids we bear,
A Gordian knot cut through and through
But it’s a blame we have to share
A penalty that’s overdue.

And they’ll be ****** up in their turn
By kids who simply do not care;
Who half the time show no concern
And half are scrabbling in your hair.

The child is father of the man
So how on earth can we complain
When they indulge cruel Nature's plan
And put us through it all again?
My latest parody - this time of Larkin's This Be The Verse
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2015
The sins of the father are visited on the children
or so the bible would have us believe.
My own experience suggests
that it is the sins of the children
that are visited on their parents.
I see in my relationship with my son
an absolute parallel with
my father’s relationship with me.
The guilt I now feel for a failure to feel,
for behaviour that was unthinking
rather than unfeeling,
but still obstructed feelings,
in my past,
I cannot criticise
him for behaviour
that I recognise
and identify as being my own
in the past.
and suspect will one day be shared
by my own progeny.
It makes me feel no better.
Nor, in truth, does it make me feel worse.
It simply is.
And has to be accepted.
And can merely be abated
by belief in the mantra that
what goes around will come around.
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2014
Once upon a time I was a rebel.
It was not what I chose to call myself;
In my mind I was a fighter –
A fighter for freedom:
A counter-oppressor.
Rebels were the others.

I was nourished
on a code of justice;
a racial attribute
taken with my mother’s milk
and reinforced
by family teachings.

Or preachings.
And it did not take too long
before my back was turned
in self-disgust on
what I termed sermonising.
(They called me a rebel.)

It was not what I chose to call myself.
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2022
There are no grains
of golden sand
to be seen
upon this black and burning beach
where we once spent our honeymoon.
In Ostia.

The brutal sun,
so uncompassionate,
that desiccates our skin
and burns the unshod feet
that venture on that dirt-black sand
in Ostia.

Why should one choose
to indurate the body
in such an unappealing
coastal strip that serves
as beach to Romans who betake themselves
to Ostia.

Particularly since
It’ll cost ya.
Today 30 June 2022 would have been the 85th birthday of my beloved and greatly missed late wife June.  I was suddenly struck by the memory of our honeymoon trip by car through France, Switzerland and Italy in 1958, and the poem I subsequently wrote and published in Let Us Then Rejoice (ASPEN-London 2016).  RIP June.
Joseph Sinclair Apr 2017
He was being interviewed on the box,
having famously engaged
in a different type of box
many decades earlier.

They, rather unkindly I thought,
produced a recent picture of him
stripped to the waist and in his boxing shorts.
neck larger than his head,
spindly legs at odds with thickened torso.
His hearing clearly impaired
by the damage sustained to one ear.
His balance slightly unsteady,
but a reminder of what used to be.
I felt really sorry for him.

And then I thought
who am I to judge?
Perhaps his life would have been pitiable
had he followed any other course.
Perhaps he might regard
the loss of certain faculties
a small price to pay
for the pleasure and fulfilment obtained
from the pursuit of a career
that was more satisfying
than any other that was available to him.

The thought sustained and cheered me.
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2022
He was my only son.
I held him in my arms,
I dandled him on my knees,
I taught him all those things
his mother had ignored.

And there were gaps
of which I grew aware.
All that I wished for my son
was poured into my love for him,
And I was alive to failure
to provide much that was required.

But through the years of gain and loss,
of triumph and disaster both
unexpected and quite unexplained,
my pride grew seamlessly
as I always did my best
and was repaid in myriad ways.

And there has now evolved
a subtle but yet distinctive
alteration in our relationship:
a clearly visible but well-defined
role-reversal as he reveals
embarrassing concern for my well-being.

Apparently, I have now become
The child of my son.
Joseph Sinclair Jan 2015
Man is certainly stark mad
He cannot make a flea
Yet he can make
Gods by the dozen
Wrote Montaigne.

But surely man can not be wholly bad
If he can make a cup of tea
With which to slake
A heav’nly cousin’s
Throat-dry pain?
Joseph Sinclair Mar 2022
Ill fares the land
Where statesmen do transgress;
Where sin soars out of hand
and honor does regress,
and we value honor
less and less.
Parody on Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village - 1770
Joseph Sinclair Mar 2022
For years I have suspected that I may be living
in a parallel universe.
This is a suspicion that has been reinforced
over the decades
by the continual depletion of my contemporaries.

And now I must ask myself:
if it is indeed true that I am on a different continuum
of space and time from all those others
who have formed a part of my existence,
then perhaps I am also responsible for its decline.

If, by the power of my thought,
by the essence of my existence, I am the progenitor
of the series of catastrophes, calamities, and cataclysms
that continually clapperclaw my world,
then perhaps I can also bring a sense of calm.

And if I do not choose to do so,
if I allow, by my own negligence,
that catalogue of crime to be unleashed
against a helpless world,
then am I not the culprit?

It is a chilling thought.
Joseph Sinclair Dec 2019
I heard a voice within my head;
its tones sweetly mellifluous.
It filled me with such melancholy
as rendered speech superfluous.

Thus does my mind becalm my mood.
The angry prejudice disperses
all that lies misunderstood
and lets my brain construct its verses.
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2014
by Siegfried Sassoon
1886-1967

In me past, present, future meet
To hold long-chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.
My love leaps through the future’s fence
To dance with dream-enfranchised feet.

In me the cave-man clasps the seer,
And garlanded Apollo goes
Chanting to Abraham’s deaf ear.
In me the tiger sniffs the rose.
     Look in my heart, kind friends, and tremble,
     Since there your elements assemble.
Siegfried Sassoon is probably best remembered for his World War I poems.
Joseph Sinclair Jun 2022
I choose to stay at home.

Wherever I go,
I'm still there.

So why bother?
Joseph Sinclair Nov 2016
Decomposing bodies.
swollen stomachs
hollow sunken eyes
Beaten and degraded
Less than animals
Music bursts forth from their wounds
The blood long since gone from dried veins.

Those chimneys stand there still
As vast totem poles
To pay silent tribute
To those six million souls
They will be reborn
as new flowers from the dust,
new life from death.
Remember them
but for an accident of birth
it might have been you . . .
or me.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2015
They came one hour before the dawn,
Each to himself complete;
Fanatic’s face and stealthy pace
On canvas roughshod feet,
And each one knew what each must do,
His destiny to meet.
  
And some wore masks upon their heads
And on some heads were none;
And some held blades, and some grenades,
And in some hands a gun;
But, common to each one, upon
Their lips an orison.
  
It was not fear induced their prayer
(They were not so devout),
It was but pious callousness
That brought their prayer about;
The arrant beat of their conceit
Permitted of no doubt.
  
That they should seize, with perfect ease,
This symbol of the might
Of that great power in one short hour
Without the need to fight,
Naively and sufficient was
To fill them with delight.
  
But no one had considered that
There was a need to guard
The sanctuary of the house;
Tradition had assured
It would remain inviolate,
Thus were they ill-prepared.
  
And even less could they then guess
Their capture by default
In that bleak hour before the dawn
To dreams would call a halt,
Uncertain whether fear or smiles
Should greet this weird assault.

But never did they speak a word
  Or pause to give a thought
To those whose confined air they shared
And whose respect they sought
Yet unaware of how much fear
Their nervous rage had brought.

The constant weight of dreaded hate,
Much heavier than gold
Held in the throes of daily woes
Lacked shelter from the cold
And bitter blame that hid their shame
Scant comfort for that fold.
  
“If it were in our power alone,
You know we’d set you free,
But we must on that greater power
Bestow our loyalty.
Our faith demands the principle
Of reciprocity.
  
“And you must know our charity
Is running out of time,
And all we ask – a simple task –
That you admit your crime
Against our great and noble State.
Confession is sublime.”

But bit by bit and day by day
Anxiety increased.
The captives could not comprehend
Remaining unreleased.
And lacked the empathy that veiled
The hostile Middle East.

They disagreed between themselves
On what their captors sought.
There were a few who took the view
That they must lend support
To something that exemplified
How steadfastly they fought.

And for their part the captors too
Debated fervently.
Our fathers too believed as you
And lived lives decently
But we have learned by pain and strife
That these things cannot be.

But bit by bit their feelings changed
Quite subtly to and fro.
And what at first they would not face,
Became a need to know
The details of from whence they came
And where they hoped to go.

Is this the land your fathers loved
And toiled so hard to win?
Is this the freedom that they sought,
Those noble fellahin?
Do you not think these deeds disturb
The graves that they sleep in?

Do they not miss their families?
What holds them in such thrall?
Eternal and infinite bliss;
Is that the mighty pill?
Deliverance from worldly sin
And quick release from ill.

Our lives depend on your goodwill
And gaining your acclaim;
To guarantee survival must
Be our final aim.
Though it reflects so grievously
Our everlasting shame.

To find ourselves in bonding mode
Emotion'lly with those
Who seemed to pose the greatest threat
And had the most to lose
Seemed but the test of all the best
That we could then propose

Avoiding trauma and distress,
We need to change our course
As rivers often cannot help
Identify their source
We still believe we can relieve
The brutal use of force

Their cruelty from weakness sprang.
(They thought themselves humane:
Considerate to animals
And sparing children pain.)
But each one knew what each must do
Ere he saw home again.

“Justice for each is what we preach
Though it may terror breed;
That we may own what we have sown:
The produce of our seed.”
(The prejudice of ignorance
May yet fulfil their need.)

What irony their actions bear
As to achieve, they sought
Their violent needs with violent deeds,
And claimed for freedom fought,
Who were themselves to violence slaves.
How dear is freedom bought?
  
“The words we use indeed abuse,
But we have no regrets;
Corruption is the rotting fruit
That decadence begets,
And those who yet will of it eat
Deserve these epithets.”

Our motivation and our aims
Weigh much more heavily
Than simple arguments against
Abuse of family.
And we, with utmost trust, will still
Pursue it mightily.

To find relief in that belief
Their pleading did increase;
That that concern in turn might bring
Enlightenment and peace.
Yet still each knew what each must do
Before there came release.

The moral that this story bears
Will evermore abide . . .  
That death did not discriminate
One from the other side;  
When each one knew what each must do  
And each one did . . . and died.
The poem was written in the 1980s.  It was based very loosely on the hostage situation in Tehran that lasted from 1979 to 1981 - a total of 444 days.  It was subsequently completed as a fictional combination of the actual Tehran events and the bonding experience of the Stockholm bank robbery that had occurred almost a decade earlier.  Incredibly in the light of recent events involving the ISAS it has once again become painfully and currently relevant.  Its intent is not to ameliorate the abhorrent behaviour of those who claim religious justification for acts for which there is no justification, but to recognise that the blamers are never free from criticism of their own actions, frequently also based upon religious conviction.   The message is that we need to seek within our own souls before condemning others.  The poem was published in my book *Uncultured Pearls* - published by ASPEN-London in the UK and Create Space in the USA in 2014.
Joseph Sinclair Jul 2019
I heard a voice that spoke to me
in tones so sweetly mellifluous
they filled me with a strange delight
and rendered speech superfluous.
Joseph Sinclair Feb 2015
I have reached the age
where being alive
is my only vocation,
and I am at one
with all living things.
So do not ask me
to destroy myself
by discarding one I love.
In loving another
I am cherishing myself.

Everyone I meet
is my mirror;
everyone I trust
is my peer.
Everyone I love
is my salvation.
And the only loss I risk
is my fear.
And this is thus the key
to serenity.
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