Biography
I have been writing verse / poems / songs all my life. I am pleased with very few of them. When my kids were young I wrote poems for them. I now have more time and want to do something with it: perform it, publish it, write more of it ... and get a bit better at it.
Samples
WE'RE ONLY HUMAN Sometimes we let something slip. That’s life. Sometimes it’s fatal. That’s death. It’s a shame. But it can’t be helped. EVOLUTIONARY GIFTS With a flexible tongue, an opposable thumb, And a mightily swollen head, Humanity’s managed to master the Earth And leave pretty much of it dead. With marvellous machines and a headful of dreams And a whole living Earth to infest, Our urge to survive has left little alive: Can we please not now kill all the rest? WHAT MAKES US? Our parents start us like a couple of kids with a grow-your-own exotic plant kit more into the digging and planting at first than the growing and the patient watchfulness. But then comes the ancient unwinding of the cells: fish, reptile, mammal, ape, the discarding of gills and the loss of tail making all dreams of return to warm seas or the safety of trees impossible. Then, finally, the uncurling of the last neural folds, heart thumping, stretching the placental sac, listening to the world outside and the rhythms of talk then gushing into life ready for everything, to be anything, ready to embrace my tribe’s embrace, to take the strain on whatever purchase on the world my tribe may have to tie the ties that make us brave to be as brutal as our gods will drive us to and as gracious but mostly to fit: to find our place and only then, if we are allowed, to think. And what then for our place, our gods, our courage, for our tribe’s purchase on the world if in thinking, we loose ourselves from the talk, the ties, and the embrace that shaped us? Is what we then hear only noise and what we see only the play of light?
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
Blog entries by William Forsyth
What makes us? (20/11/2025)
Blog link: https://www.writeoutloud.net/blogs/williamforsyth
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