Reibus

Poetry is inspirational. It is magical; lyrical; metaphorical; figurative imagery; tension, rhythm and emotion. It is all of those and much, much more! If you love poetry, you understand it. Years ago I became entranced with poetry. As a child I had learned children’s poems like Baa Baa Sheep and Jack and Jill . As I grew up I began writing my own poems. I fell in love with the ‘cats’ poems written by T.S. Eliot: Andrew Lloyd Webber used the poems for his Cats musical, and to sing them and see them on stage hooked viewers. I have recently read a poem by Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) written in his class at school in 1970 that seemed to sound so good (read it yourself!). My personal poetry changed from enjambment to villanelle to free verse to rhyme, yet I wrote my poems as stories, comedies, songs, feminism, environmentalism and politics. For me, poetry tells my own tales. This one I wrote in 1975, and it told just how I had felt after I ...

Two nights ago, 30 January, I watched a news article on ABC about the rapists who violently abused Jyoti Singh in December 2012 who are to be hanged, 1 February 2020. Because they reported from India, ABC said that they couldn’t use the name of the woman who was raped. I know who she was – and so does every other global newspaper and media I have read since December 2012. I will continue to use her name. Earlier in 2012 I had started the Whacksworks blog. On 1 December 2012 I went to the inauguration TEDxSouthBankWomen in Brisbane, but I didn’t write about what caused me to cry for a long time after this excellent TEDx event. I was supported very well, there. Jyoti was raped only two weeks after my breakdown. On 16 December 2012, in Munirka, South Delhi, India, Jyoti and her partner got onto a bus to go home from the movies, not knowing it was a private bus with 6 violent men on it. Those men beat Jyoti and her boyfriend, Awindra Pratap Pandey, with iron bars, viciously rap...