Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label work

You do not have to be good

Kamsin Kaneko has just started a new poetry prompt over on her blog HERE , and for the first one she chose this poem, Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver, to provide inspiration. I hadn't come across it before, but it's widely available on the internet, here it is again for you, if you've not had the pleasure: Wild Geese - by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and...

Advice to corporate ladies: a poetry post

I've been listening to talk about dress codes and sexual discrimination on Woman's Hour . It's taken me back to the years when I worked in offices. I tried to dress 'appropriately' but was constantly getting in trouble about my appearance. My hair was the wrong colour, my shoes were the wrong height, I wasn't allowed to wear trousers in court, I needed a tailored jacket, and so on and so on and so on. I once had a workplace appraisal (joy) wherein my line manager told me that I was scruffy and wouldn't be taken seriously. She was wearing a waistcoat so I chose to ignore her sartorial advice. It's incredibly difficult to find clothes that are deemed suitable for an office and which also fit chubby bodies... I suspect that it's actually the bodies that are deemed suspect.  Anyway, according to recent research discussed on Woman's Hour women, espeically young women are still being required to dress for other people's gaze, to wear high heel...