trouble, trouble,boils and bubbles
with the bedroom tax, a storm is brewing
as the government makes their friends rich,
while making the rest of us poor,
with their voices of capital drown our song.
Time for some love making, time to keep warm,
feel the touch and comfort of raptures arms,
taste and feel the anchor of love,
that makes their power redundant,
in acts of unconditional embrace.
Surrender to gentle heartbeat,
that simultaneously melt and mend,
in the morning awake,
paint the days with passion,
follow ports of possibility.
We wake make buds,
then petals, then leafs.
outside darkness drives
in the other direction,
we struggle on,
connecting others.
hand on hand
shoulder to shoulder,
draw breath, reach out
resusicate hungry mouths,
ah, it's a beautiful feeling
this thing called love.
Samer Issawi is currently living his last hours inside an Israeli prision hospital after over 200 days on an open-ended hunger strike demanding justice and his freedom since July 29th 2012. Being illegally detained without charges or given a fair trial since July 2th 2012. He is still placed in solitary confinement.
There have been many more Palestinian hunger strikers before him; Khader Adnan, Hana Shabi and Mahmoud Sarsak.
They have gone on hunger strike to allow their voices to be heard. Protesting against the inhumane conditions that they live in. Using nonviolent means to express their plights. In 1943 their was Ghandi and in the 1980s their were the Irish hunger strikers, which at the time got a lot of attention in the world wide news and drew a lot of support, but today the international media is ignoring the plight of the Palestinian hunger striker.
Back in October 2011, Issawi was released as part of the Shalit prisoners exchange deal, and they were told their would be no restriction on their movement, however eight months after his release, Issawi was re-arrested in Hizma. Israel claimed that he had broke the terms of his release by leaving Jerusalem, yet Israels own maps show that Hizma is within the borders of the municipility of Jerusalem. Proving that Israel never abides by any agreement or treaty and ignores all international laws. This has happened to many other Palestinians released under the prisoner exchange agreements.
Samer's life now hangs in a thread, back in December 24th he released a short message via his lawyers ' My detention is unjust and illegal, just like the occupation is. My demands are legitimate and just. Thus I will not withdraw from the battle for freedom, waiting for either victory and freedom - or martyrdom.'
His condition is now critical, having lost more than 80lbs of weight, vision worsening day by day, continuous diarrhea, acute B12 vitamin deficiency,excruciating pain , vomiting blood, with great difficuly breathing, but still he remains shackled. Still bravely battling on for his freedom and for that of others.I have raised the issue with my local M.P , perhaps you could do the same. Remember too the company G48 that provides equipment for the prison administration. G48 realises that they are used in non-humanitarian ways against Palestinian prisoners. It must be held accountable for its responsibilty to these prisoners and its partnership to the occupation in its inhumane practices.He is currently living his last hours, this plight of administrative detention, is barbaric and must stop. He has a right to live , to not die without a charge. His situation is urgent and critical and is the worst since he started his strike. According to the Red Cross he is in his last dying moments.Still hungry for freedom.
Samer himself has lost many family members over the years, murdered by the Israeli occupation. In 1989 his grandmother Fatima was shot by the Israeli Occupying Forces.Hunger strikes have proven to be an effective means for Palestinian Political prisoner to protest. They are protesting against the inhumanr conditions that they are forced to live in. These non-violent hungers have arippling effect on all Palestinian prisoners. Their movement has commenced many detainess passing away and others gaining freedom. Their protest a peaceful weapon of resistance has been largely ignored by the B.B.C using cruel and bizzare excuses for doing so http://electronicintifada.net/content/bbcs-cruel-excuses-ignoring-palestinian-hunger-strikes/12072. I urge you to write or subit a complaint on line about their lack of reportage on this issue, which clearly shows a form of bias.
I for one will not forget them.
Captive Bird - Fadawa Fagan
The echoe of your melody reaches us, flying over narrowness with love, over the bars.
Captive bird, blend of darkness and pain.
Sing, yes, because if the iron deprives you of the vast sky.It will never be able to shut our ears.
Sing, yes, because the grip of the night never closes the way of hope.
Your song reminds me of your times bent from the sands of time. When with a light step, you would free
your wings, to the cloister shadow of jasmine, they were leading you to the womb, and you told us about the
dreams, and the pride and the strength you would laud, and closer you would get the stars to the ground,
and we listened to the fiellds made green by you, the splendour of hillocks, and the whisper of perfumes,
pride without rising,unless you win. .
Sing bird for u, from prison, over the humiliation and beyond the darkness, a horizon still full of dreams.
A sun yet readily ambush. White glory of light sings happily, sings a future homeland for our dreams,
sings of vivid dreams not lost. Sing yes, for the hope is always there, the road is still and radiant,
although around us, the anger of the night thickens.
from Nablus 1st March 1917 till 12th of December 2008
Poem translated by Elettra Luisa
Hunger - Doc Jazz ( Free Samer Issawi)
song dedicated to the courageous Palestinian hunger strikers among those held in so called administration detention by the occupation forces of the Zionist entity that calls itself 'Israel. This song was inspired specifically by Samer Issawi on his 199th day of hunger strike at the upload of this video.
Edwin Muir described himself thus: " I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time accidents happened to me. Then in 1751, I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751. but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul the invisible leeway. No longer I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937 -39)
He was born at Deerness on Orkney, Scotland in 1887, and educated at Kirkwall Burgh School. Sadly, his family lost their farm which was known as 'The Bur' a place that he loved dearly, that held special resonance in his heart.
Unfortunately a combination of high rents and poverty forced a move to Glagow. Moving from his beloved homeland , he was also forced to take on a number of menial jobs, and became increasingly involved and interested in left wing politics. He taught himself German, read Nietzsch and joined the Independent Labour Party. This was followed by a number of sad events, first his father died, then his two brothers and finally his mother. In 1919 he married Willy Anderson after a peroid of depression and seld doubting,and they subsequently moved to London in search of work, a move he did not take lightly as he viwed his former life in Orkney as a kind of 'Eden, and this transition he thought of as a journey to hell. In 1921, they moved to Prague where he wrote journalism and essays that earned him acclaim in England and America.
He was a relatively late developer with his writing, and only came to real prominence with the publication of his book The Labyrinth in 1949.Most of his best work was written after the age of fifty. Many of the poems in this book were based on Muir's experiences while working for the British Council in Prague immediately after the war, and the book remains one of the most consistent and serious collections of poems to be published since 1941.He became rather prolific, and his work marked his reputation as a severe and very Scottish writer whose work sometimes seems marred by an excessive plainess of style, but his best work rises to a massive seriousness.Informed by the Scottish ballads and incidents from his Orkney childhood and Calvinist background, they seem to me to be mystical and visionary, confronting the struggles between good and evil, life and history as an existential journey. With his wife he was the first to translate the writings of Franz Kafka and Heinrich Mann, and into English and became increaingly interested by developments in modernist European literature.
Today he is identified as one of the central figures of the modern Scottish literary Renaissance, both for his poems and his book Scott and Scotland (1936) - in which he argued controversially that Scottish literature would have a better chance of international recognition if it were written in English, a line that brought him into direct opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh Mac Diarmid, another literary force of this era.
He and his wife travelled extensively to Italy, Prague. Salzburg, Vienna.Spending considerable time on the continent, which allowed him to immerse himself in its culture. He had a long association too with his fellow Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Whether abroad or at home in London he did all that he could to keep in touch with Scottish affars, and in his autobiography he expressed his yearning for its independence, and more than likely would have approved of the calls for home rule that are being called for at this moment in time in Scotland.
In 1946 he was appointed Director of the British Council. In 1950 he became warden of Newbattle Abbey College, a college for working class men, and iin 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvaed University.Though he had been a staunch socialist in his earlier years, through his experinces of living and travelling Czechoslavakia, he had witnessed totaltarianism at first hand, and his later poems took on a more cynical air. The influence of his strict Calvinist upbringing and strong religious faith, remained undimmed , but nevertheless he did not let the human spirit go unchallenged.He still had the need to question and probe.Though I personally have no religious faith, I still respect his poetic pulse and the clarity of his vision. An intriguing writer nevertheless, whatever your beliefs.
He died in 1959 and is buried at Swaffham Priory, near Cambridge.
A particular favourite poem of mine by him is the Horses, which takes him into the realms of science fiction. A terrifying picture of a world after nuclear disaster painted in the opening section, is then beautifully contrasted with the arrival later of the mythical horses. They remind me a little of the white horses of the Camargue as they appear in a famous French slow-motion film, but in fact they are the farm horses which Muir remembered from his childhood in the Orkneys. This is perhaps the most movingly optimistic poem to have come out of the world of the hydrogen bomb.
The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenance with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north.
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radio dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll moulder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and we were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companianship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world.
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden,
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our
loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life changed, their coming our beginning.
The White horses of Camargue
The following poem , clearly draws on one of Kafkas main themes, conveying the helplessness of civilians in the face of officialdom.
The Interrogation
We could have crossed the road but hesitated,
And then came the patrol:
The leader conscientious and intent,
The men surly, indifferent.
While we stood by and waited
The interrogation began. He says the whole
Must come out now, who what we are,
Where we have come from, with what purpose, whose
Country or camp we plot for or betray,
Question on question
We have stood and answered through the standing day
And watched across the road beyond the hedge
The careless lovers in pairs go by'
Hand linked in hand, wandering another star,
So near we could shout to them. We cannot choose
Answer or action here,
Though still the careless lovers saunter by
And the thougtless field is near.
We are on the very edge,
Endurance almost done,
And still the interrogation is going on.
The following two express his visionary religious impulses. His eternal quest so to speak.
Merlin
O merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
Across the memory and the wave?
Or a runner who'll outrun
Man's long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
and Time locked in his tower.
The Good Man in Hell
If a good man were ever housed in Hell
By needful error of the qualities
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,
Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,
Fill half eternity with cries and tears,
Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate
In patience for the first ten thousand years,
Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat
That, uttered, dooms him to rescindles ill,
Forcing his prsying tongue to run by rote,
Eternity entire before him still?
Would he at last, grown faithful in his station,
Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,
And now among the damned the damned doubts of damnation,
Since here someone could live and could live well?
One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, all Eden could enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place,
And love and hate and life and death begin.
and finally this one which I think is rather magificent with wonderful powerful imagery.
Scotland's Winter
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in hus winter saket,
And sweeps his artic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull
The miller's daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldiered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the judgement day.
But they, the powerless dead,
Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
with their frozen life and shallow banishment.
"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind." - William Seward Burroughs.
To bad Bill that you aren't around to see the shape of things today, my beating heart thinks that on most things, you were probably right. Our plaintive meows still cry out. Nothing matters, nothing changes, happy 99th Birthday. Their are various forms of death, permutations gathering storms, but that does not mean that everything is lost. Everybody in, everybody out.
Fear and the Monkey (August 1978)
This text arrange in my New York loft, which is the converted locker room of an old YMCA. Guests have reported the prescence of a ghost boy. So this is a Oui-Ja board poem taken from Dumb Instrument, a book of poems by Denton Welch, and spells and invocations from the Necronomicon, a highly secret magical text released in paberback. There is a pinch of Rimbaud, a dash of St-John Perse, an oblique reference to Toby Tyler with the Circus, andthe death of his pet monkey.
Turgid itch and the perfume of death
On a whispering south wind
A smell of abyss and of nothingness
Dark Angel of the wandereres howls through the loft
With sick smelling sleep
Morning dream of a lost monkey
Born and muffled under old whimsies
With rose leaves in closed jars
Fear and the monkey
Sour tastes of green fruit in the dawn
The air milky and spiced with the trade winds
White flesh was showing
His jeans were so old
Leg shadows by the sea
Morning light
On the sky light of a littlle shop
On the odour of cheap wine in the sailor's quarter
On the fountain sobbing in the police courtyards
On the statue of moldy stone
On the little boy whistling to stray dogs.
Wanderers cling to their fading home
A lost train whistle wan and muffled
In the loft night taste of water
Morning light on milky flesh
Turgid itch ghost hand
Sad as the death of monkeys
Thy father a falling star
Crystal bone into thin air
Night sky
Dispersal and emptiness
Originally published as William S.Burroughs. "Fear and the Monkey," Pearl 6 (Odense , Denmark:Fall/Winter, 1978) Mine taken from The Burroughs File, City Lights, 1984
Is Everybody in - William S. Burroughs
Words and Advice for young People - William S. Burroughs
After Imbolc, as spring awakens,
under inches of soil,
they are waiting to roar,
anticipitating the moment,
to thrust out, in vast spread.
Amorous sleepers,
that wake our senses,
year after year,
white heads,
that hang around in corners.
Temporary residents,
side by side,
go back to earth,
and hibernate.
Leave without struggle,
wait paitiently to waken,
and bloom again,
rise like hope,
pushed again,
from down below.
AMEN
Far from this madding crowd
As the birds that fly high above
their are some who are not among us
who follow forever
alpha and omegas pulse.
The articulate and confused
still seek some learning
get lost in blind faith
because of trust in ancient
books of judgement.
We can all gain strength,
in answering back
clinging in still ferocity
to the clasp of heaven's mercy. Touching the earth,
feeling its love
sharing humanity's depths
until rivulets end
and all our tears run
in rivers of abadonment
Anas Al-Barbarawi is an artist from Jordan. Of Palestinian origin, he grew up in the Talbieh Refugee Canp south of Amman. But he doesn't want that to be all you think of him.
In the short stop-motion film Matar (Rain) produced in conjunction with the Palestinian Memory Documentation Project. Al-Barbarawi hopes to cross borders and question stereotypes of the refugee life.
