Michael Bartholomew-Biggs was born in Essex and grew up in Surrey and Middlesex. He started his career as a research mathematician in the aircraft industry and in higher education. In the late 1980’s he began writing poetry and found early encouragement at the Toddington Poetry Society. In 1995, he had the good fortune to meet the Canadian poet Nancy Mattson at Lumb Bank. This encounter led rapidly to marriage and a move from rural Bedfordshire to London where he and Nancy now run the Poetry in the Crypt events at St Mary’s Church in Islington. Since 1998 he has had several chapbook collections published and his poems have continued to appear in magazines and anthologies. He is currently awaiting good news about a first full collection.

Quelle: poetry p f

To Whom it may Concern

When I heard the way they'd treated you
I wanted, very calmly,
to crush my glass against the table top.
And that would testify
I hadn't anything to do with them –
not the border clerks
who fingered through your papers,
nor the authors of their picklock questions,
shaped to make the wrong replies slide out
like bolts drawn slowly back across a trapdoor.
I wanted to shout down their smug assumption
of my mute agreement
to brand you, steal your clothes and make you dance.
Denials alone won't do
for those who make their own small ugly choices.
I needed, very simply,
to know if God could answer
the question of how far the likes of us
should take an inkling of complicity
when we remember how they treated you.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
from Inklings of Complicity, Pikestaff Press,
2003, ISBN 1 900974 23 1