I've been doing a lot of ranting about current affairs lately.
This is in good faith, because this is the most hopeful and positive moment for truth and justice that I can remember.
So anyone who is against smugness and badness needs to stand up and be counted in any way they can.
We've got about a year, so if you have a bonkers-one-person-crusade to launch, now is the time. And remember, the smaller the better.
But I have to remember that listening is a much rarer and more valuable skill than talking, and especially than shouting.
So to make sure I don't forget that, I decided to copy out my favourite poem, which is My Mother on a Seat Outside a Hospital by Peter Sansom.
It's about the man that Sansom's mother was married to before his father, dying alone on a hospital ward after an accident, because his mother and her sister were too shy with people in authority to ask to be let in early in the morning, even to sit with her husband while he died.
I like it so much because it listens so carefully to people who don't get heard, and so bear more pain than they should because of that:
"It took him days to die
where, outside on a municipal bench,
two young women, girls they call themselves,
are anxious and not tired,
deciding to give it another half-hour -
despite the sixth sense that sent them there -
before bothering anyone so early."
Point of Sale by Peter Sansom on amazon.
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