Steve Gray's Homepage

Well, I've written several poems over the years, and here are a few I thought I'd publish online. I've categorised them into three groups of poems. The first group, the "God" poems are expressions of my Christian faith. The second group, the "Social Justice" poems deal with real-world issues which I am passionate about. The third group, the "other" poems are just things that I've written for fun.

God Poems

• Amazing Love
• The Hope of Ages
• Words from the Cross
• Two Sides of a Coin
• Time
• The Love of the Lord
• Trials and Joys

Social Justice Poems

The first social justice poem, The Year of Jubilee, came out of my feelings on what was then the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel Third World Debt - the unpayable debt that poor countries owe to rich countries. The debt basically means that any money their governments get goes towards servicing the debt. Unfortunately, the poem is as relevant now as it was then. And, in case you're wondering, HIPC is the scheme under which poor countries can sometimes get debt relief. Its major downside is that it imposes lots of conditions - usually that governments must reduce their spending - before any debt is written off, and that the amounts written off are often too small to make a difference in the repayments being made.

The second of these poems, In Search of Asylum, was written when I worked for Oxfam and they were campaigning against the appalling way in which we treated Asylum Seekers in the UK. At the time, they were only given seventy percent of income support - officially the minimum amount of money somebody needs in order to live, and weren't allowed to earn money. Most of this money was in special vouchers that could only be spent in certain shops - and the shops weren't even allowed to give them any change. Although their situation has improved, we still treat asylum seekers incredibly badly.

Other Poems

The other poem on this site, Number 21, was written as an entry in a competition run by a magazine in the run-up to the year 2000. The competition was to write a vision of what might happen in the 21st century within a particular wordcount. The poem didn't get anywhere in the competition, but it's intended to be a mildly fun look at what might or might not happen in the 21st century.