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Tag Archives: national poetry day

What’s your favourite liberal poem?

By The Voice | Thu 8th October 2015 - 2:47 pm

It’s National Poetry Day today so we thought it might be worth asking you to nominate your favourite poem with a liberal message. What poem has moved you or made a liberal point in a unique way. Let us know in the comments.

We also thought you might like to see this piece from 2012 in which Edis Bevan looked at the poetry of Denmark’s Piet Hein. We are nothing if not good Europeans.

In a mad world, remember Denmark’s Piet Hein. Theoretical physicist, poet, wartime resistance activist, mathematician and simply a human being in all its warmest glory. His short poems (Grooks) have a haiku-like quality, reflecting on the simple complexities of life, and as a consequence of real politics as it hits real people. I have cherished these gems for a long time, and wonder if other Liberal Democrats might find them helpful.

His first ever Grook was published in the newspaper Politiken under the Nazi occupation of Denmark. It was

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again