Perhaps it’s all the years of teaching, but I’m feeling end-of-termish. We’ve done all the hard work and revision and tests. We’ve had the concerts and the trips to Flamingo Park. We’ve tidied the stock cupboards and taken down the displays, and we’ve read our reports and we all got gold stars and smiley faces. Everyone’s thinking of poetry and poetry festivals, like Chaucer’s pilgrims. It’s time for a story before we all go home.

I’ve been looking back at what we’ve done and who we’ve met, and  because Kim Moore chose one of his poems from ‘Talking to the dead’ for her Sunday Poem last week, I looked again at one post about my friend Gordon Hodgeon. Bright star.  I was writing some months ago about my circling obsession with myths and with tyrannical gods. Recently, for reasons I cannot fathom, I’ve been writing translations and adaptions of…