Lifelong

I’ve been working at 60 years-worth of poems, trying to edit a collected version and a selected version – watch this space as they say! Meanwhile we hope you might find this poem of interest and encouragement

Tony Holden ‘Lifelong – for Barbara,’ February 2022

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[1]

The longer I learn, the stranger I find

Being human on planet earth – it is all

Astonishing, complex, diverse, shifting -

It’s all unlikely and, [what’s the word?], ‘strange’ –

[2]

And yet - we live in neighbourhoods and communities,

We use our basic interdependence and connectedness

We strive, at the very least, to ‘do no harm’ and then

We act, at our best, with kindness and compassion,

[3]

And yet – we continue to use our hard-worked experiences,

We persist in meeting life and each other head-on

We encourage and nourish the people we know and love

We strive to grace the texture of our daily living.

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Footnote - Siri Hustvedt ‘Mothers, Fathers, and Others - New essays’ 2021 “Platonic thought became part of Christianity, and Christianity, even for non-Christians, has directed our thoughts for centuries in the West.” // “Plato famously thanked heaven he was not born a woman or a slave. Aristotle described women as inferior beings and deformed males. I admit that I love reading Aristotle. I return to him often, but I am acutely aware the Greeks, Aristotle among them, were misogynistic and their legacy is alive among us. The mind/body split haunts contemporary ideas just as it dominated Greek thought.”