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ARC Home > Projects > Sacred land :
Sacred poems | About the poems | Five poems

About the poems

One of several posters illustrating the sacred, produced by children at Rushey Mead School in Leicester

by Jill Pirrie

(Advisor to the Sacred Places Writing Competition)

‘Nobody has words like me
Nobody has my dreams’


Thus wrote ten-year old Sana Ahmad. The distinctive words and dreams in this collection capture a spirit of place as elusive as it is familiar, as personal as it is tribal.

Whether writing about an ancient yew, a holy shrine, or simply about their own special place, these young poets have much to teach us. Eleven-year old Livvy Hanks’s lines:

‘The young people live too swiftly to remember secrets,
But the bold knight holds them all.’


are cautionary; they arrest the headlong pace of our everyday present to return us to the beginnings which are the wellspring of collective wisdom and personal grace.

Even more importantly, many poems express an unconditional affection for earth. When seven-year old Tabitha King compiles her litany of ‘I love you’s for the ancient yew, she articulates the primal urge to engage with our wilderness past. In so many ways this Millennium project has been a coming home. From that sure foundation, the future looks as bright as these poems.

Read five of the poems

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