John Leonard’s Literary Pages

Words’ purpose— to tell
Of the earth and starry sky,
All living things between,
Of sunlit, spindrift moments,
Where only and once can you
Find yourself, your time.
(from ‘Words’ ’)


Certainty becomes time’s whole cloth;
But that is what we never can have,
And a moment more in time shows
Our time is out of true.

Certainty sees only the straight road;
Many chapters have been written,
Many conclusions proposed, all comfortable,
But we cannot know the end of our story.
(‘Certainty becomes...’)


Welcome to my literary pages. I am an Australian poet and writer whose work concentrates on the concerns expressed in the passages above: the necessity for people at this crucial moment in history not to lose sight of humanity’s place as a part of nature, the necessity for rejecting the imperatives forced on people by the dominant political culture, in favour of humanity, flexibility, humour and insight.

Click here to read more.


Note: please do not confuse me with an another Australian John Leonard,
editor of Seven Centuries of English Verse, a widely-used anthology,
and proprietor of the John Leonard Press.

Other John Leonards not to confuse me with are the Canadian Miltonic scholar,
the (late) American journalist and contributor to The New York Review of Books
and other publications, and the US 2012 Olympic Team swimming coach.

Find these other namesakes on Google.

© John Leonard 2020

These images were taken at noon on 5 January 2020 outside Parliament House, Camberra. The smoke from the Australian bushfires of December 2019 and January 2020 has resulted in the worst air pollution ever recorded in the Australian Capital Territory. The drought that has caused these bush fires has been worsened by anthropogenic global warming, and thirty years of inaction by the political and business elites of Australia and the world. 6 million hectares have burnt, there have been many deaths, many properties lost and the toll on already-threatened wildlife is catastrophic.