Features

Poetry Corner: VE Day 75 – Wait for Me

As part of the celebrations around the 75th Anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, Challenge’s Poetry Corner will be featuring a selection of poems from across the world, inspired by the war and its events.

Here we feature Wait for Me written in 1941 by Konstantin Simonov. The poem is written from the perspective of a Soviet soldier heading to the front, addressing their spouse or partner. It became a favourite of Soviet servicemen and women at the time and continues to be popular in Russia today.

Reclaim Pride!

We’ve all been to Gay Pride at some point. Whether you marched behind the banners, covered your face with glitter or danced the night away surrounded by drag queens, there’s a special place for gay pride in the hearts of the LGBT community across the UK. However, there’s something very wrong .

Pride, sadly, is a shadow of its former self. What once started as a protest riot on the streets of New York against police harassment has become little more than a street party – decades of moderate politics, commercialisation and corporate sponsorship has turned protest signs into glossy adverts; angry slogans transformed into 2-for-1 offers at Nandos if you wear a rainbow badge.

Bridging the divide: the cosmos and the two cultures

From the Babylonians to the Greeks to the Mayans, the practises of science and literature existed in some form or another at the centre of every ancient civilisation. They represented to them what they continue to do to us today: the most fundamental desire of our species to know the world around us, and to share that knowledge with others. Tens of thousands of years came and went while spending little time at all drawing distinction between these disciplines – ones today we perceive as being repellent strangers to one another – as often they were one single entity. Ancient aborigine civilisations considered the stars the campfires of passed spirits, spawning many a story that were undoubtedly shared around more terrestrial campfires, from generation to generation, through spoken word rather than ink and parchment.

Somewhere down the line, between then and now, the entity broke in two.