Featured Poem: Cities and Thrones and Powers by Rudyard Kipling

Last week, staff from The Reader Organisation got together in Liverpool for one of TRO's Think Days. Members of our staff from all over the UK gathered at TRO HQ for a day full of thinking, food and - of course - lots and lots of poetry. With big things ahead in the future - our plans to transform Calderstones Mansion House into an International Centre for Reading and Wellbeing being just one - we certainly have a lot to think about and plan for.

This poem by Rudyard Kipling was chosen by The Reader Organisation's Deputy Director and Development Director Chris Catterall at Think Day, inspiring us with new visions of new buds being put forth and a vision we shall take forward into our year ahead and the years beyond: of much work that endures, through the foundations of great literature.

Cities and Thrones and Powers

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.

This season's Daffodil,
She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
"See how our works endure!"

Rudyard Kipling