Author: Harry Gallagher

A poem about how accidently going to a drinks party could happen to anyone..

Last night, I was unfortunate enough to overhear a meeting of the local UKIP party. I’ve never heard such an unhappy bunch of winners, their whole meeting seemed to be about settling scores with unbelievers!

Humdudgeon is an imaginary illness or pain…

Desmond Tutu

This for my mother, that hometruth bearer, who taught perseverance in a house made of ice. This for my father who each Hell sent day smashed iron from stone in the lightless depths. This for my school with its jagged desk edges, each one a snag on black, heavyset tights. And this is for me, […]

Libraries are a lifeline and arguably one of the best things about living in the UK

There is nothing quite so grey as the wintered backstreets of a shutdown seaside town pulled up its sheets against the day. There is nothing quite as cold as yesterday’s fish and chips laid around sleet-shocked ground, skittered by seagulls embittered, emboldened. There is nothing quite as long as the patient wait for Spring and […]

(with apologies to Charles Penrose & a smidge of Orwell) I know a fat old conman, he’s always on TV, blundering and bluffing after pints of G&T. Can’t keep it in his trousers, he really is a treat. He couldn’t lie straight in bed where he lives in Downing Street. (Chorus of privileged guffawing) He […]

This past few days have been an interesting time to study the media and get a feel for how the UK government can manipulate headlines and use them both as flak and as a shield for what’s really going on. This week the Prime Minister announced a crackdown on drug users and subsequently appeared dressed […]

Yes, I remember last Christmas waving from the street frosty season’s greetings, the day distant, incomplete. I remember phone calls with my kids, a distinct absence of hugs, never thinking for a moment we’d been taken for mugs. Some of us were working in plastic mask and gown, sweating down the hours in every city, […]

Arwen Flounces Off Her tantrum all but blown out Arwen flounces off down the street. Must be one of those people who grew up around the slamming of doors, the issuing of threats and the stamping of feet. Me, I like the quiet. Nights in, wine open and the blowing of the diet. Thoughts meandering, […]

Jackie Milburn picks up dog ends on the high level bridge, beneath the all seeing stare of Stephenson. Joseph Swan drinks Carlsberg Export, huddled on a pavement mattress outside the Holy Jesus Hospital. Bobby Charlton smokes his last in bed, red all over his face; no consolation goal, no-one to see. While darling Grace saves […]

there is an England of sycamore trees dappled in sunlight their dalmation leaves standing guard over verges of ginnels between houses whose doors bear a welcome, kettles ever bubbling, sofas ever dented from shared laughter at daftness of ice cream vans tinkling their way through the 99 dreams and the skipping of children, fists full […]

It didn’t begin with uniform wearers,
armband bearers; that’s just where it ended,
with proud keyholders
to blandly wicked gas chambers.

We reclaim this land, these seafronts, these fields whose owners have stolen them, hearts black as coal. We reclaim this England in the name of its children whose blood runs rich with the planet’s every pitch: from Africa’s sons, chained and enslaved, dragged to the North, to build a great wall; from Saxon invaders who […]

A thousand dead crabs washed up on the sand, a torn and tattered note littering no man’s land: “Poison all your rivers, dump sewage in the main. Then taking it in turns party as the planet burns, and choke to death on the shame.” Harry Gallagher

Early one morning in 1966 – a poem by Harry Gallagher

Slick your hair back smooth, hold your arms wide open. Tell your fellow countrymen their beloved land is broken. Play on their grossest fears and promise wage increases, then take your shiny hammer and smash their land to pieces. When the fabric is dismantled from ceiling down to stanchion, wave a cheery farewell and retire […]

There are poets in front of you on the Poetry Escalator To Heaven. From dawn to dusk, non-rhyming, they climb aboard The Golden Stairway Of Acceptance. Their poems sing like hymns, like Arts Council bids you were too lazy to fill in. In your darkest dreams, they’re laughing at you, but that’s not really true. […]

We can’t afford the heating and petrol’s being rationed suddenly telling the truth seems terribly old fashioned. The food isles are half empty, we’re all going on a diet, now Project Fear is Project Here those baying voices are quiet. Their vivid sunlit uplands, so alluring years before, are now as distant as the stars […]

‘Fancy Mice’, I found out today are just domestic rodents, which I feel confident saying is a missed opportunity. How much better it would be if The Fancy Mice were instead a manufactured pop group circa 1973. They would sing falsetto over cheesy backing tracks they’d never heard, before the soft clunking of a studio […]

There are foodless holes on my regular strolls around supermarket shelves, the wheels on my trolley having come off, and the folly is we did it to ourselves. We looked back rosily at war, at Normandy and Agincourt and opted for more strife. Now the irony is endless; we sit here friendless as driverless lorries […]

When will it dawn on you we are anything but friends? Still, 75p says you’ll stick with me until the bitter end. Were you hoping that my gloss would grub off on your sleeve? You’re as foreign to me as the refugee I spit on as they leave. Just because our target’s placed on someone […]

It will not be long now until dandelions have strangled the black ground beneath them and no traces remain save for the props and the poison filling up the cavernous belly of the carcass slain by a fortyfaced dragon bent on revenge. It will not be long now until nobody is left who remembers the […]

The hollowmen are here bumbling in the breeze, truth on yoyo strings, there and yet not there. Stickysmiley candymen painting panstick facts that washaway nightly onto hazy crazy paving. Battendown your boltholes, the goons are on the loose, reaching for the foreigner, the handshake, the noose. Ring them bells at midnight, their dolour dark and […]

The ladies and gentlemen of the lifeboat crew will not check for skin colour before extending saintly fingers, risking all so a stranger may live. They know you cannot catch fear through the meeting of lips, the free donation of air to buy another second. The coxswain for today heard the shorebound wails of “All […]

Dawn Butler, MP was removed from the chamber last week for saying that the Prime Minister: “lied to the House and the country over and over again”. It seems that you can be called out for exposing lies but not for telling them in the first place. Pigs live in sties, Yorkshire puds rise, wet […]

These youngmen so heavy with a country’s hope,
legs shredded by the studs of high-footed politicians,
these torchbearers of the truth, their light
shaming the shade of cynics in corners.

What I want to come home is social justice, honest leaders who can point the way away from intolerance and blame.   What I want to come home is a sense of shame at homelessness, and people who cannot even afford to eat.   What I want to lose is an uncaring elite who can […]

Sweetheart; a poem by Harry Gallagher about sexual harassment and revenge