This is an introduction to a poem called ‘All it Takes’ or ‘Clay Birds.’ Although I hesitate to call it a poem. But that’s my problem. Not yours. And I’ll be talking about that in another introduction. I was listening to the editor of The Economist magazine. When

don’t trust bird stories they have short lives are pleased to please themselves tell of quick movement quick and alive and don’t trust the pain of trees they bear up the sky look the sky is blue … the big kauri on the ridge supports half the sky calls

… the worst vices of our digital societies: intellectual irresponsibility, proud mediocrity, implausible denigration with impunity, but most of all verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying the participants got involved in with incomprehensible enthusiasm, the cowardice of all aggressors who used pseudonyms to vilify but would never repeat their insults out loud.

each person has their own singular encounter, not just with the deceased but also with the event itself, … death … Nobody can be denied their relationship to it, their membership in that society. And death as something that is, rather than as the lack of something, is sobering to behold. That

my mother and my father are far away and huddled together against the weather they look hopefully out to the sea as if one of us is coming to pick them up and the odd thing is that they show no resentment at the lateness in their faces as they