Across the world, every autumn, thousands of young people leave their homes to study at a university, and, then, to find work in a city. Most expect to avoid cruelly hard work, with the plough, the spade, or the loom, and to find congenial work, in the air-conditioned office, at meetings, or writing reports. Then there are all the young people who will not make it to college, for one reason or another (usually, poverty). But all of you need learning and understanding, and some of it can come from writing your own poetry, or reading others’. Call my poems candles in the wind, which have illuminated my life, and others’ too, and may do the same for yours, as we all face up to the realities of our situations and societies. Seeing what is true, in our corner of civilisation, may be more useful to us, and more easily communicated, than creating or analysing verses which conform to a culture’s prevailing values. Bring your critical faculties to bear on my poetry – ask yourself, what is true in these poems, and what is not? And learn.