I was shocked to find out yesterday that the poet (and former Professor of Poetry at Oxford University) Alice Oswald has been arrested under the UK’s draconian anti-terrorism laws at a peaceful protest for holding up a sign supporting Palestine Action, an organization opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed by Israel against the people of Gaza. Among the others arrested were an 89-year old woman and a blind man in a wheelchair. I expect these absurd and unjust actions will achieve the exact opposite of what the Government intended.
Anyway, I am an admirer of the poetry of Alice Oswald. I posted one of her poems here, and have four collections of her poems:
I thought I would post another now to express solidarity with Alice Oswald. This one is from the first of the collections shown above, in which it is simply titled Sonnet, though it is not a form of sonnet I have ever seen before!
Spacecraft Voyager 1 has boldly gone
into Deep Silence carrying a gold-plated disc inscribed with
whale-song
it has bleeped back a last infra-red fragment of language
and floated way way up over the jagged edge
of this almost endless bright and blowy enclosure of weather
to sink through a new texture as tenuous as the soft upward
pressure of an an elevator
and go on and on falling up steep flights of blackness with
increasing swiftness
beyond the Crystalline Cloud of the Dead beyond Plato beyond
Copernicus
O meticulous swivel cameras still registering events
among those homeless spaces gathering in that silence
that hasn't yet had time to speak in that increasing sphere
of tiny runaway stars notched in the year
now you can look closely at massless light
that is said to travel freely but is probably in full flight
by Alice Oswald
In the Dark 