Please send me a little poem or a short lyric, a couplet or a haiku.
We need to undo the offence and hurt inflicted on immigrants and refugees in this country that has been caused by terrible words written and spoken in the last few days. I am asking you to help me replace them with beautiful, supportive and welcoming words. My aim is to gather a thousand short poems that show how elegant and graceful the English language can be rather than how harsh and brutal. I want people who arrive here from all over the world to know how our language can be generous and warm rather than mean and vicious, and how we can use words to make people feel welcome instead of like unwanted vermin.
Whatever the constitutional and economic outcomes of Friday’s vote to leave Europe, one of the most frightening results is the rise in racist and anti-immigrant activity across the country. Our beautiful language is being used to frighten children, threaten women with rape, express violent hatred and
describe fellow human beings as sub-human. I really want to do something bright
and positive to counter this horrific abuse. I’m starting this #WordsofWelcome campaign therefore to counter ugly and threatening language with words of welcome. I’d like to get a collection of couplets, rhyming or otherwise, together – each its own little offering of welcome.
We are all people who use the English language for our work. We all know both how beautiful it can be and how powerful. So please help me turn these words of hate around and transform them into words of welcome.
You can send me your #WordsofWelcome by email or ideally on Facebook or Twitter. Please don’t forget to tag me or use @RegMeuross and the #WordsofWelcome hashtag – I really don’t want to lose any of your words!
Please do share this far and wide, but always ask people to use #WordsofWelcome so we can pick them all up and collate them. If you would like to take a picture of yourself holding the words that would be really fantastic too.
Thank you!
Reg x
POST TO:
www.facebook.com/regmeuross.com or
or post your words in the comment box below
e.g. “When all the doors behind you close, My door is always open” #WordsofWelcome @regmeuross
A thousand welcomes to you
Our brothers and sisters
may you find peace and happiness
Love and compassion
always
Home
Chatting in a bar
with nine of my closest friends
from eight distant lands.
Thanks Mick
Come, welcome, take my hand and let us walk together side by side and leave our footprints in the sand today and every day, and let tomorrow become today, for tomorrow never comes.
Sally Mawson 6th July 2016
#WordsofWelcome
Interesting to see Ralph Mctell at the top of your page – the words that instantly spring to mind (hope Ralph doesn’t mind us sharing the chorus from his brilliant song)….
So how can you tell me you’re lonely,
And say for you that the sun don’t shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
Show you something to make you change your mind
‘There but for fortune go you, or I’
Phil Ochs 1963 still true half a century later.