We need hope in these dark times and Confluence Collective founded by Malcolm Atkins and friends never fails. I wrote a poem celebrating how the group bring creative people from every community together, from India and Pakistan from Ethiopia and China, Iran and Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan as well as France and Greece and Spain and Germany. Marian Eastwood who, unknown to me, filmed me reading it, was born in the Philippines. The only way the world will solve its problems is by coming together and flowing together…

https://www.facebook.com/marian.eastwood.3/videos/738207275337957/?  Here are the words

Creative Confluence by Sylvia Vetta

Streams spring from the hills

to swell with spring rain.

People come to the city.

More and more people come.

They sing alone in

tongues of Babel.

 

Come together pleads the man

Flow together echoes the dancing woman.

 

She dances to the sitar and the guitar.

Male and female voices sing to the tabla’s beat.

‘Improvise’ demands the drummer.

Words flow as the rivers of Oxford rise.

Words from the Tigris and the Indus

Rhythms of India and Africa.

 

Come together pleads the man

Flow together echoes the dancing woman.

Wells of joy spring from Ethiopia and Iraq

From Bosnia and Brazil.

Mardi Gras meets Bach and Persian lute

Babel ? No Babel ?

The music of their souls

harmonise and improvise.

 

Come together pleads the man

 Flow together echoes the dancing woman

 

Learn more about the group.  https://confluenceoxford.com/  and join us  coming together to celebrate in music poetry and dance and take part .  Cafes  are welcoming and informal.

They shared my edited version of Shelley’s Ozymandius – what future generations will make of   Donald Trump.

Maga maga: King of Kings

I met a traveller from the  antique land of Persia,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked the Keirs who knelt before him
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is the DONALD , king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”