Who Sleeps at Night?

Poetry of conflict

Dissent can be a good thing, unless you are killed for it. We live in a world of social fissuring and disruption, where families and nations are stressed by the contexts we live in. Globally, we are witnessing the biggest population movement ever known. This is interlinked with the causes and effects of massive changes in climate which is causing unresolvable tensions around water and land access, citizenship and poverty. Armed conflict, fear, persecution and exclusion allow the fermenting of corruption and war. I write poetry to express contemporary issues and questions of our times about war, language, environment, climate and the planet’s health, translation, dislocation, migration, terrorism, border crossings, dissent, gender, protest. Poetry is a specific way of knowing, of crystallising the dissonance in the dominant discourses in a way which is accessible to anyone who is driven by revolution, and which gives expression to social conscience.