Jennifer Maiden Poems

(US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed those European countries which opposed the US attack on Iraq as only 'Old Europe')
Old Europe stared at her breakfast,
buttered her croissant, sipped coffee
...

('Operation Iraqi Freedom')
It felt odd from the start, this war.
At the start, the 'death' of Saddam
when Baghdad was bombed, but
...

The door isn't locked. You walk
through the empty rooms and look for a person -
then for a sick one, then for a dead.
...

Madeleine Albright wears two lapel pins.
Her lapel pins before this were increasing
self-definingly in size but not in number, their
...

Street into sky, walls into sky, his ribs
taut with oxygen unclotting, uncurdling
like milk taken off the flame,
...

Radiator.
the warmth stretched her veins,
etched them puissantly on
her calves. Their daughter
...

(When asked if there was an example who had inspired her as Dietrich Bonhoeffer inspired Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard replied ‘Nye Bevan')

Aneurin Bevan woke up in flat Bathurst, to the drone
of Julia Gillard's ‘Ben Chifley, Light on the Hill'
...

(When asked if there was an example who had inspired her as Dietrich Bonhoeffer inspired Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard replied, ‘Nye Bevan'.)

Aneurin Bevan woke up in the Lodge, in Canberra.
Julia Gillard was on the TV. Bevan
...

When I was twenty-one, I wrote in
‘The Problem of Evil' of how the partisans
always rather feared an odd
irrelevance of farce - and that today
...