A Robin sings in the palm house

Outside the cold wind blows, but inside there is tropical heat
And a robin is singing in the Palm House, not a canary or a parakeet.
I walk down the spiral staircase and finally our eyes meet.
A robin is singing in the Palm House, with a voice honey sweet.
Heavy white doors swing open onto sorrow and defeat
While a robin still sings in the Palm House, with its voice honey sweet.

Phil Hall

Comments

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION : The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

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