Poetry

Janine chats with Pippa from Five Leaves about writing, politics, motivation, lockdown, poetry and much more. Warning: may contain poetry and book extracts!

The all-autistic theatre company performed this show in Brighton in June 2019. Janine and fellow performers offer insights into autistic experience through poetry and personal testimonies.

Three Bridges

Seven a.m.

Half moon

Five platforms

No trains

Two queues

Ten replacement buses

Seven leaden workers

Four going in

Three going home

Two more hours

Until forty winks

Rosa Luxemburg

As I'm sure you must have heard

Was jailed and murdered as she would not conform

And preferred revolution to reform

Michael Gove

Spun and stitched and wove

A tapestry of policy

Of bloody awful quality

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Photo: Chris McAndrew / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)

Herbert Morrison
was moderate and worrisome
He had an appropriate grandson:
Peter Mandelson

Peter Mandelson
could not get a handle on
The passionate, radical, principled and quarrelsome:
rather like his grandfather, Herbert Morrison

Emmeline Pankhurst
among feminists, ranked first
Until she ruined her story
by becoming a Tory

Henry the Third
was somewhat absurd
He endorsed the Great Charter
and ignored it thereafter

Tony Abbott
jumps like a rabbit
from homophobic bile
to climate change denial

Simon de Montfort
got off on the wrong foot
He persecuted the Jewish
but won the Battle of Lewes