Today I am voting twice: first for a political party, then for a tree.
In a busy city, there is little room for trees to become old. On average, a city tree lives for 50 years.
The Hague doesn’t have many old trees: during WWII a lot were cut down, their wood used for cooking and heating. Of the 120,000 city trees, only around 1300 have the ‘monumental’ tree status.
Such trees are over 50 years old and meet at least one of these criteria: it is irreplaceable, of rare type, shape, or size. It may have historical value, or provide a home for rare plants or animals.
Photo credit: Joost Gieskes
The veteran tree initiative comes from the UK. The first official veteran tree of The Hague – even of The Netherlands – is a lime or linden tree (Tilia x europea) on the Clingendael Estate. This was planted around 1733.
I came across it on my walks during the first 2020 lockdown: Clingendael is close to the camping where I had my caravan. I was intrigued to find a tree in a corner of a field with a fence round it.
A veteran tree is protected and allowed to remain in place forever. A ‘monumental’ tree may be cut down when it becomes dangerous or diseased.
Japanese flowering cherry, tree. 92, 13 m wide.
The Hague local authority has nominated 10 trees and invites people to vote for five of these to become a veteran tree. The five trees that don’t get veteran status will become monumental trees. All the nominated trees are between 70 and 220 years old.
This is much harder than choosing a political party!
Will I choose that Japanese cherry, or the ’12 Broers’, tree no. 73, a 220-year-old oak that had a tough life (cut down often) and now has 12 trunks (the brothers), or choose the 145-year-old Mourning beech that houses falcons. I will let you know.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.
Having her Cake
The chocolate cake, left over from her annual pre-Christmas do sits on a large white china plate, dwindling in size day by day, an unwashed fork lying next to it, a temptation to any passers-by, though no one ever sees anyone else eating it and it would have been sacrilege to open the cutlery drawer, select a clean fork, place the used one in the sink or the dishwasher, but someone on the third day I’m there removes the plate, crumb-covered and sticky, replaces it with a tidy paper version tucking the now over-large piece of cling-film around the edges clumsily, carelessly, as if it no longer mattered, as if at any moment it could be binned plate and all.
What you can’t wake
The dead. No, not even the dogs, grumbling at being shut in their crates, beside her bed peering through the grate, eyes full of reproach.
No, you can’t wake the dead, but the not-quite-dead are too awake, their eyes peeled until the last, their flesh jumpy, their muscles braced.
Beneficiary
Released from the need to worry for herself, she frets about the falling stock market on behalf of her beneficiary, a willowy young hairdresser, the daughter she never had, who will inherit everything: the rambling shambolic bungalow with its million and one flaws: the water pressure that shuts down the whole system when the shower is on, necessitating bouts of shouting, water, water if someone so much as turns on a tap to rinse a cup, brushes teeth, flushes the toilet in any other part of the house — a second-hand Honda Jazz, a rusting dishwasher, a dog run which looks like a concentration camp for canines, meant to be protection from ‘critters out there,’ and the stock market falling, falling, falling.
Biography
Widely published and the winner of many prizes, Wendy Klein is a retired psychotherapist, born in New York and brought up in California. Since leaving the U.S. in 1964, she has lived in Sweden, France, Germany, and England. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s death when she was nine months old, her nomadic years as a young single mother and subsequent travel. She has published three collections: Cuba in the Blood (2009) and Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, and Mood Indigo (2016), from Oversteps Books., plus a new and selected, Out of the Blue (2019) from The High Window Press. Her first pamphlet Let Battle Commence (2020) from Dempsey & Windle, was based on her great grandfather’s letters home while serving as a Confederate Officer in the US Civil War. She shares her work on https://www.cronepoet.com.
Last year I wrote about the ‘Ongelezen Boeken Club’ (Unread Books Club), a new venture where libraries promoted books on the ‘null list’ – books that have never been taken out.
This year, the ‘Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag’ (National Day of Unread Books) coincides with another new initiative: De Week van het Verboden Boek(The Week of Forbidden Books). Bookshops and libraries throughout the country are showcasing books that have been or are still censored.
On Wikipedia, you can find an article on book censorship, a list of banned books and the main list of books banned by governments. This starts with the Bible and Albania and ends with Yugoslavia.
If I counted correctly: 66 countries. ‘Almost every country places some restrictions on what may be published, although the emphasis and the degree of control differ from country to country and at different periods.’
Wikipedia lists 66 books that have been or are currently banned in India. A small number, relatively speaking. The earliest is a Gujarati translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. This was banned by the British Authorities in 1909. In August 2025, the Indian Home Department banned 25 books for ‘propagating false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir.’
Here in The Netherlands, there is only one book officially banned: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1924). In 2014, a bookshop owner in Amsterdam was found to stock and sell the book. There was no prosecution.
However, training for new staff in bookshops routinely includes how to deal with aggressive customers. Library staff find returned books with pages torn out. A Dutch survey last year found that (1 in 7) authors had to deal with aggression, threats, intimidation – much of it online.
Here is the cover of Lale Gul’s debut published in 2021, when she was 23. It’s an autobiographical account of growing up in a strict Islamic family. It became a bestseller and was translated, but Lale has since been in hiding.
If Tallinn is on your bucket list, you can visit the Banned Books Museum while you’re there!
I’m delighted to share poems by Matthew Paul from his new collection with Crooked Spire Press. The poems demonstrate Matthew’s ‘unflinching clarity’, and his ‘fierce attention to detail’. His biography follows the poems and there you can also find a link to his own website.
Spent Matches
Mum lets only Granddad light up in our house. The second Thursday of every other month, she fetches Grandma and him over from Sutton. The chalkhill-blue elegance of the Wedgwood ashtray rhymes with unfiltered smoke rings pixilating like Ceefax in the living-room air.
Teatime doesn’t wait for Dad: Hovis, Primula, Shippam’s fish paste, allotment tomatoes, cress; mini rolls, Penguins, cremated fruitcake; pots of Brooke Bond PG Tips; Beryl Ware replaced by Royal Worcester, on Hay Wain place mats. Chit-chat wilts like Dad’s California poppies.
Mum fills space with monologues. My brothers’ progress; mine. WRVS activities. Her botched hysterectomy. We watch Grandma’s must-see, Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’ says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters and Legs & Co. baffle him into silence; except
when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’. ‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless, to Chamberlain’s jubilant declaration of peace. Barely through the door, Dad re-buttons his coat to take them home. Granddad beams, ‘Abyssinia!’
Photo credit: Liam Wilkinson
A Common Hand
I don’t have to prove whether I did it or not; if they can’t see it, what kind of damned experts are they? [. . .] I’m not a crook; I’m just doing what people have always done in the history of the world: ever since art was invented, people have made imitations of it. Eric Hebborn, ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’, Omnibus, BBC TV, 1991
Eric pestles oak gall, gum Arabic, pinches of iron Sulphate and rain into ink with ‘a gorgeous patina’, To pen his line on slyly foxed paper, in the styles Of Pisanello, Poussin and sundry other old masters, Reshaping preparatory sketches to make pentimenti, Faking collectors’ monograms as cherries on top.
At junior school, Eric, aged eight, discovered that Burnt Swan and Vesta matchsticks’ charcoal tips Burnished imagination’s marks, incurring, firstly, Welts from a leathering for possessing matches, Then a three-year stretch in an Essex reformatory For wilfully setting cloakrooms on fire. A flair for Painting sees him into art schools, lastly the RA, Where, though he wins every prize, contemporaries Remember Eric only as ‘a silent creature’; ‘a joke’.
They would say that, since he’s brought their craft Into disrepute. ‘Dealers are not interested in art, but Money,’ he says. ‘The real criminal, if there is one, Is he who makes the false description; guiltier by far Than had he manipulated the nib himself. Ignore The fusspots. Enjoy art, without worrying whether Attributions are correct.’ Museums have everything To lose from uncovering Eric’s handiwork; queasily, They check their acquisitions back to the Sixties And issue, de haut en bas, highly selective denials.
‘No one is studying art with honesty,’ claims Eric, Upon the publication of The Art Forger’s Handbook In Italian. Out in Trastevere three icy nights later, He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva, Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.
In Which I Spend a Fortnight of my West Berlin Summer in 1987 Doing a Few Hours’ Cleaning Per Day in Some Multinational’s HQ
My Iraqi supervisor Zaynab and I enjoy, for our lingua franca, helpless amusement. Every day, precisely at knocking-off time, we point at the clock, chorus ‘Sechs!’, then cackle like siblings.
Dieter, fellow cleaner, never gets our jokes. Just like me, he’s twenty and nearing the end of a gap year; mandatory, before enrolment at Humboldt. Mine’s elective, for my mental health. He and I view the city’s halves from the roof: the Wall zigzags like the Western Front.
Afterwards, we take the U-Bahn —he buys a ticket; I don’t— to the agency’s office, at Nollendorfplatz. He translates the clerk: I won’t get paid until next week. ‘Scheisse,’ I say. Dieter deadpans: ‘She said, “Ah, so the English boy can speak German after all”’
Biography
Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in June 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. He blogs here.
Recently, I had a short reunion with the friend I met 35 years ago during a holiday to China. Our reunion last year was in Ghent, Belgium. I was very pleased to discover a branch of De Slegte, second-hand bookshop, in the same street as our hotel. I’d come by train with a rucksack: spending was modest.
I lent Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates to my friend, so she had reading material for her journey back to the UK. I am a keen reader of short stories, glad to have the paperback returned to me. I enjoyed these: the mundane sadness of domestic life.
As the blurb says: ‘a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true – and just beginning to ring a little hollow.’ Yes, it’s bleak, like Raymond Carver without the humour. Yates had a difficult childhood and suffered from TB which must have coloured his view of life.
Yates is probably best known for his first novel Revolutionary Road. It was published in 1961 and an instant success. The 2008 film with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio was true to the book.
Bookshop De Slegte, Ghent, Belgium
Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property (2016) includes 11 short pieces about Sadness which are spread throughout the book. Here is an extract from Granta’s website: ‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside-down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’
Writing prompt
Go with loneliness or sadness if it appeals. Or choose another emotion/feeling you would like or not like to write about. Choose a few colours which you like and a few you don’t. What comes out of the melting pot? In her prose poems, Ruefle mixes the descriptions of concrete objects with some abstraction, and off-beat imagery: Grey sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum,….
Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It {….} is the confusing sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent…
It’s an enormous pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Pam Thompson. Pam and I met 13 years ago on an extended writing course. You can find her biography below the poems. These are from Pam’s prize-winning pamphlet and show the range of her writing. The Paper Swans pamphlet competition was judged by John McCullough: ‘Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair’. The intriguing cover image is also by Pam.
Explorers, Antarctica, 1901
The leader sits on the sledge. He never does this. It’s against the rules of the expedition but now there are no rules.
Two huskies – the two remaining huskies, they ate the rest – sit either side like imperial lions.
The ship is stuck in frozen waves. The crew are starving or dead but this photo will be evidence that they reached their destination.
The photographer in the black hood. Stepping back. Pulling the cord. The flash.
Self Portrait as Fulang Chang
Freedom, chica, is all. I’ll wear the mandarin’s hat and silk waistcoat, eat all the honeyed grapes, to stay favoured, like a first-born.
I perch on her left shoulder, always on guard, never at ease. I bare my teeth and scream, at Diego and the village dogs.
I am the brush passer, ear for her secrets, but I am all chat, you know, teller of her tales though she isn’t one to keep schtum.
The bloody hearts we paint will drip onto the Blue House floor.
Fête Galante
Take the bus from outside the Water Margin Chinese restaurant—or from where it used to be in 1974—allow plenty of time. You’re at work in Lewis’s, folding up school shirts badly, cramming them back in their packaging; in a History of Art lecture looking at a slide of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’. The bus will be full, people will be smoking on the top deck, so will you. This must be your stop. Is it everybody’s stop? You join the flow—you think of Tracy Emin’s tent with the names of all the people she ever slept with, or is it her messy bed you’re thinking of. All the beds you ever slept in. Lewis’s. All the shops you ever worked in. And the canteen in the factory where the men always patronised you. Here—you say to the tiny chef—you scrub the bloody burnt pans. All the patronising men you ever worked for—they all get off the bus. You watch them cross London Road. You haven’t moved very far. The Water Margin is the water’s margin and you wonder how this pond, this lake, this sea, arrived in the city. There are willows, and, over there, a fête galante, a woman on a swing, being pushed and pulled, higher and harder, by all the people she ever slept with.
Biography
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in March 2025.
The original wind phone, photo credit Matthew Komatsu
It’s a year ago today that my brother died. If grief is love with nowhere to go, the wind phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.
The initiative was started in Japan by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi Prefecture in 2010. Sasaki said: ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.’ Hence the name Kaze no denwa’ – phone of the wind. The disconnected old-style rotary telephone allowed him to deal with grief after his cousin’s death of cancer.
Sasaki: ‘When your heart is filled with grief or some kind of burden, you aren’t in tune with your senses. You’re closed off like curtains have been pulled around you. After you empty your heart a little bit, you might be able to hear some birds singing again.’
The following year close to 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. In Tokohu 10% of the population died. Sasaki allowed local people to use the wind phone. Over 30,000 people have made the journey to this telephone since, and wind phones have been set up in other countries. The wind phone also provided inspiration for films and novels.
Amy Dawson (USA) lost her daughter Emily to terminal illness in 2020. She learned about wind phones and now devotes much of her time to maintaining a listing of wind phones worldwide, providing advice and resources. The current total is just over 400. Not all calls are to a deceased. People make calls about other losses. Go to her website for more information. There is also an article on Colossal
The first wind phone in The Netherlands was placed in 2019. There are now eight, with a further eight being planned. The locations include Haarlem – the town where my brother and sister-in-law lived before moving to the nearby village of Spaarndam.
I imagine a wind phone, the black cord snipped, in the dunes of Wijk aan Zee – where I’ll celebrate my special birthday this weekend, and where my brother and I spent much time as children during the summer vacation.
It’s my pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Patrick Wright. Patrick and I met years ago at Manchester Poets. Earlier this month his poem Archive, inspired by Anselm Kiefer, featured on the blog. You’ll find Patrick’s biography at the end of the post.
Today I’m sharing more poems from his substantial collection Exit Strategy, a ‘vivid exploration of grief and loss’. Tamar Yoseloff said of the collection: ‘Patrick Wright is one of those rare poets who can translate the complex images of visual artists into precise and pitch-perfect language.’
Patrick has been inspired by artists past and present (Rousseau, Klee, Rachel Whitehead, J M W Turner), to mention some well-known names.
The collection uses a wide range of forms (couplets, tercets, stanza, sonnet, ghazal, prose poem) and makes excellent use of white space through columns and indents. WordPress can’t do justice to formatting. Therefore, I’ve chosen poems with a more traditional lay-out.
COLD DARK MATTER
After Cornelia Parker
Thanks to you I am learning to see again through a sparseness of particles—
like how I learned to listen to an eyelid twitch once yes and twice no through a coma.
Darkness I’ve come to realise is a privilege— known at 4am & sleepless
the sun rising like a scalpel & turning the room purple.
Somehow, we go on & somehow it never ends & we go on like a double pendulum.
Perhaps love is like this fixed explosion. Perhaps you’re nearer now than the word belief.
SHADOW OF A GIRL PLAYING WITH A HULA HOOP After Giorgio de Chirico
It used to scare me, what this girl is doing, or those around her, off in the blind field. Seemingly a girl playing with a hula hoop, or just a shadow, no source, just a shadow next to a wagon, its backdrop here a dusty plaza. Somewhere, I feel, from an upstairs room, an eye looks at me. Somewhere, off screen, a murder is taking place, this shade a clue. Even so, things are too belated now, this girl clearly a phantom and not a muse, like she’s in a toy shop or inside its puzzle, no girl playing so nonchalant with a hoop. The sun, at these times, is no longer a sun, more likely a lamp. My fingers are syllables. And this pine table where the postcard sits is full of knots, staring like gods from above.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S UNTITLED
& already I see alpines prise their way through the brutalist grey of Chernobyl floors. Through the sarcophagus they reach for sunlight. Maybe we only learn what the burn of graphite means once blind. I know you better after knowing disaster.
I’ve studied the colour theories of Goethe and Albers where the wheel & the wheel of life are a way to feel closer. I am the stalk through the fallout, one that insists on pushing its way & one that’s been patient. On the surface we share the mark of detonation.
They say a town like this is void though one pulse of a deer’s heart makes it a plenum. A full spectrum will reveal itself only when you’ve pledged to cease hurting. Through this I see what you saw when the sun set & made shades on a radiator. We are both on the side of art.
WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH SKATERS AND BIRD TRAP After Pieter Bruegel the Elder
I find no pleasure in the ice. Everything about me lies still—save for murmurations.
Peasants weave between trees: each crystalline like coral on a seabed.
I give you a winter landscape in place of a mirror. The bird trap is my heart.
Soon it will be still, a skull in a crypt, lit by candles. My hills are a wishbone. They undulate under great tension.
The skaters are insouciant, crows peck their shadows. My face startles—a chance alignment of stars.
Skaters are on slippery ground and if they should slip, they have nothing to cling onto.
Biography
Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The North, Gutter, and The London Magazine. His debut collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His pamphlet, Nullaby (2017), was also published by Eyewear. His second collection, Exit Strategy (2025), was published by Broken Sleep Books. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.
Aus Herzen und Hirnen spriessen die Halme der Nacht, 2019-2020. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, straw, gold leaf, wood and metal on canvas. Dims: 471 x 841,5 x 36 cm. Collection Voorlinden.
Our guest poet this month is Patrick Wright. As I was reading his collection Exit Strategy (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) I came upon the poem Archive and discovered that Patrick and I are both very interested in Kiefer’s work.
For me one of the highlights last year was visiting Bilderstreit, a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at Voorlinden Museum, The Netherlands. A few weeks earlier I had watched the documentary that Wim Wenders made about Anselm Kiefer. I was blown away too by the film: it’s in black-and-white and one can watch it through 3D glasses.
Kiefer was born during the bombing raids in the final months of WWII. For him, everything exists somewhere in the cycle of death and rebirth. Whenever he creates a new work, he knows that one day he will destroy it: attacking it with a flamethrower, axe, bolt cutter, or red-hot liquid lead.
ARCHIVE After Anselm Kiefer
Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered, looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in sepia tones. I saw the bullies too, with razored eyebrows, piercings, fists in my gut, spit on my shoulder, the stench of Lynx, using queer as an insult. With my SLR, I clicked more in hope than expectation. I fumbled with fixative, the stop bath, the gelatin swell. My negatives solarised. I kept re-visiting as a witness. Those days, I bit the inside of my lip, stubbed cigarettes out on my arm. When the dysmorphic class photos were framed, still as that winter, your golden hair, said the Kiefer print, your golden hair, Margarethe.
It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’ guest poet Kate Noakes. Kate and I met during the first lockdown on Zoom (a group set up by a fellow poet). Kate Noakes’ most recent collection is Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Her website is www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com. She lives in Bristol.
Earlier this month Kate’s poem The Sick Spring appeared on the blog. It is from her pamphlet, Chalking the Pavement, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. At the heart of the book is Field Notes 2020. Field Notes has 65 entries: observations of life during the first lockdown in the form of prose poems.
I’ve chosen five, from the beginning and end of the sequence. All of them show Kate’s acute attention to detail as she ‘captures the soon-forgotten details of the changes to our lives’.
Field Notes 2020
Children are rediscovering, or discovering, the pleasures of chalking the pavement with hearts and messages of love for the NHS. Hopscotch has the thrill of the new, but neither the girl nor her mother knows how to play it. I look around for a handy stone. None are at arm’s length.
*
The slates pathing my garden are sleek with wet. Dust is dampened. This morning after weeks of early summer-in-spring is a change and a good one. I’ll rest indoors trying not to dwell on my friend’s friend: just two years older than us and dead. All day the blackbirds have busied about the garden in search of nesting materials. Such industry, even in the constant day-drip of rain.
*
My neighbour tells me he’s been scaled back to three days a week with attendant pay cut, yet considers himself lucky; most staff in his firm having been let go, along with eight percent of those in hospitality.
*
A windy day for children to learn or relearn the small pleasure of flying a kite. Prescriptions need at least a week’s notice and the pharmacist tells me there is some drug rationing. We have learned that a life is worth sixty thousand pounds; in case you’re ever wondered. And again there is no surprise in discovering that some people believe rules only apply to others.
*
I want my day to always start with a fishing heron and a cormorant drying its wings on the foreshore near the bridge, the tide running out, and the sun brilliant on the water. White stripes on the river path every two metres are a constant presence that it is hard to ignore.
Acacia Publications 