When the Government - Adrian Mitchell (24/10/32 - 20/12/ 08)

When the government whips
when the government whips
it's a special kind of gangster
bashing out its brutal will
with a mouthful of morality
heartfelt of cruel thrill

When the government kills
when the government kills
it's a special kind of murderer
srangling with a hypocrite's sigh
mouthful of deterrence
heartful of hang shhot and fry

When the government tortures
when the government tortures
it's a special kind of thug
who's trained to be a terrorcop
mouthful of security
heart full of poison to the top

When the government bombs
when the government bombs
it's a special mass murderer
crazy with its own success
mouthful of democracy
worldful of emptiness.


Originally Published in Blue Coffee, Poems 1985-1986.
Bloodaxe Books

still very apt
I feel.

...Nothing is Random - Luna Auriga Serena

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be,
whether a long string of perfectly blue day ,
that begin and end in golden dimness,
the most seemingly chaotic political acts,
the rise of a great city,
the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light,
the distributions of fortune,
what time the milman gets up,
the position of the electron,
or the occurrence of one astonshingly frigig winter after another.

Enen electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability,
are tame and obsequious little creature that rush at the speed of light,
going precisely where they are supposed to go.
They make faint whistling sounds that when apprhended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying throuh a forest,
and they do as exactly as they are told.
Of this, one can be certain.

And yet there is
a wonderful anarchy,
in that the milkman chooses when to arise,
the rat picks the tunnell into which he will dive
when the subway comes rushing down the track,
and the snowflake will fall, as it will.

How can this be?
If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined,
how can there be free will?
The answer to that is simple.

Nothing is predetermined;
it is determined,
or was determined,
or will be determined.
No matter, it all happened at once,
in lesss than an instant,
and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance
the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given-
so we, track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece.

Time, howver, can be easily overcome;
not by chasing light, but by standing back
far enough to see it all at once.

The universe is still and complete.
Everything that ever was,
is;
everything that ever will be, is,
and so on,
in all possible combinations.
Though in percieving it we imagine that it is in motion,
and unfinished,
it is quite finished and astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are,
any event, no matter how small,
is intimately and sensibly tied to all others.
All rivers run to the sea;
those who are apart are brought together,
the lost ones are redeemed;
the dead come back to life;
the perfectly blue days that have begun
and
ended in golden dimness continue,
immobile and accessible;
and when all is percieved in such a way to obviate time,
justice becomes apparent not as
something that will be, but as something that is...

(Miyagi, March 14th 2011)

This is my random thought which I've been thinking since this morning. So many thoughts running on my mind. The sudden earthquake, the sudden  blast of nuke plants and Nothing is Random.

Roger Waters - Tear down this Apartheid Wall.

K

In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, was banned by the government of South Africa because it was being used by black South African children to advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so to speak, on certain songs, including mine.
Twenty-five years later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the song to protest against Israel's wall around the West Bank. They sang: "We don't need no occupation! We don't need no racist wall!" At the time, I hadn't seen first hand what they were singing about.
A year later I was contacted to perform in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from a movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was unsure whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go.
The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit the occupied territory to see the wall for myself before I made up my mind. I agreed.
Under the protection of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.
If it culd be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel's occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: We don't need no thought control."
Realising at that point that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would legitimise the oppression I had seen, I cancelled my gig at the stadium in Tel Aviv and moved into Neve Shalom, an agricultural community devoted to growing chick peas and also, admirably, to co-operation between different faiths, where Muslim, Christian and Jew work side by side in harmony.
Against all expectations it was to become the biggest music event in the short history of Israel. Some 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. It was extraordinarily moving for us, and at the end of the gig I was moved to exhort the young people there to demand of their government that they attempt to make peace with their neighbours and respect the civil rights of Palestinians living in Israel.
Sadly in the intervening years the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably annexing more and more of the West Bank.
For the people of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel's illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to support their families. It means that university students with scholarships to study abroad must watch the opportunity of a lifetime slip away because they are allowed to travel.
In my view, the abhorent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denials of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Where governments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means at their disposal. For me this means declaring an intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people of Palestine but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree with their government's policies, by joining the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
My conviction is born in the idea that all people deserve basic human rights. This is not an attack on the people of Israel. This is, however, a plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to artists in other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott.
Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa's Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes - and it surely will come - when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve."

This article originally appeared in the Guardian and The Morning Star.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/11/cultural-boycott-west-bank-wall

Obviously a successful boycott requires a general consensus. Can any boycott be described completely as just, is their perhaps room for compromise. Their inevitably will always be casualties on either side. Yet it is fact Israeli artists have freedom and thought to express themselves freely around the world, wheras this is not the case for the Palestinians who are prisoners in their own land. Daily Palestinian land is being stolen, their houses demolished and crops destroyed.Though recently Ian McEwan recently visited Israel and openly critisised actions goin on in Israel's name, standing in solidarity so to speak, I personally find that generally cultural visits normalise and legitimise Israel's actions.
Anyway a growing roster of international performers have declined to whitewash Israel's policies, these include Pete Seeger, Gil-Scot-Heron, Devendra Benhardt, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz and the Pixies. Another argument for some performers playing is that music can have a healing force. Not when your on the wrong side of a prison wall it doesn't.

R.S Thomas - Here

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow,
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.

Ist is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

Bradley Manning - The Forgotten Man

Bradley Manning is a 22 year old Army intelligence analyst , not a person I know personally but he spent his schooldays down the road from me in Pembrokeshire. He went to school in Tasker Milward where he is remembered for his integrity and intelligence. His mum, aunts and uncles still live in Pembrokeshire.
I personally believe him to be one of the bravest people of our time, it is being alleged that he released information to Wikileaks of abuse and corruptibilty in the army and governments. Barak Obama himself has said that whistleblowers themselves have an important part to play in democratic societies.
One of the videos he allegedly shared contained images of a US helicopter attack that killed 11 innocent civilians in Baghdad, Iraq. The Army, however  soon covered up this evidence of a war crime and somehow declared it "justified". Now they brand the exposing of this and their part in a massacre criminal. They have also accused Bradley of having shared documentation of similar atrocities ( " Collateral Murder" ) in Afghanistan.
Bradley has been identified as a person of interest regarding the release of  90,000 battlefield reports describing civilian deaths inflicted by occupation forces in Afghanistan, collusion with warlords, corruption, and an unvarnished view of a decade-long war. But still no actual charges have been made against him.
Instead of being lauded he has since been persecuted and hung out to dry.

Since these things have happened things have got far worse for Bradley as the Independant Newspaper and the News Statesman has reported. Beneath the U.S's veneer is the brutal treatment he has recieved. He has now been locked up for 8 months, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day, kept in a prison cell 6 feet wide and 12 feet high, ritually forced to spend days naked, simply because he embarressed the US army, and shown the world how lax their security is that a 22 year old could access all their information and simply download it onto his ipad or memory stick. Does any human deserve such humiliation, especially in a country where their is so much talk of freedom in other peoples lands. Is this the world that we live in now, I believe that instead of being treated like a common criminal we should be showing him gratitude, and he should be rewarded for bringing these abuses of military and governmental power to our attention. God knows what will happen to Julian Assanges if the Americans get their hands on him. Bradley's health is now beginning to deteriorate, he has become withdrawn and catatonic , feels persecuted and is now barely able to communicate.Is this how America treats its heroes. Mistreated and abused ! For humanities sake we must challenge this, e.mail your M.P, your AssemblyMember, Congreessman, Barak Obama himself, sign online petitions, anything. We simply can't afford to forget this honourable man.. http://www.bradleymanning.org/

INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY / A Century beyond the Fragments.1911-2011

Some writings for International Womens Day.

SARA TEASDALE (1884 -1933)

American Poet, work much influenced by Christina Rossetti. Died after an overdose.


There Will come soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of thewar, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.


Irina Ratushiskaya (4/3/54)

I Shall Write

I shall write about all the sad people
Who have remained on the shore
About those who have been condemned to silence-
I shall write.
Then burn what I have written.
Oh, how these lines will soar,
How the sheets of paper will fall back
Under the fierce blast
Of irrepparable emptiness!
With what haughty movement
The fire will outstrip me!
And the ashen foam will tremble.
But give birth to nothing.

Henriettte Roland- Holst (24/12/1865 - 21/11/52)

Henriette Roland Holst was born in Amsterdam. A student of Marx, she joined the Socialist Party, but broke away and founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1915.
Her poetry shocked readers at the time for its unorthodox rhyme and rhythyms and its subject matter.

Untitled.

Throughout the day we are able to ban the voices
Because the task takes all our strength,
But when day's fruit has ripened ito evening
We feel the many questions tightening like bows.

Half content we settle around lamps
Ans around the sadbess-defeating hearth's fire,
Relieved that the day which has emptied
Has left no dregs of greater pain.

For there is always something that we fear;
We are like the wives of fishermen at sea
Who day after day scan water and wind:
All they have heaves on the waves.

Our heart is embarked on world-whirling;
Storms and stillnesses move us,
Surf breaks against us, and we feel
Each shuddering go through our depths.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933)

Was a German, Marxist law reformer, pacifist and political anarchist. Jailed in 1914 for anti-war activities.

... far too many do not shrink from demanding from the workers once more new sacrifices of blood and property for imperialist wars. ' We went through the World War with its terrible demands and horrors, let the young men now bear what we had to bear,' so declaim, in heroic pose, men who in their time in the trenches piteously complained of being cannon fodder for capitalist profits, and ater the conclusion of peace swore, 'no more war.' The meaness of their attitude is self evident. The progressive workers have always felt it to be their elementarry duty that the fight of the 'old generation' should spare oncoming youth the pain that they have suffered, in order that the youth might reap where their fathers sowed, in order that they might grow beyond them, promoting the rise of mankind to higher life in freedom and culture. With our glances firmly fixed on the fate, the rights and the tasks of the youth, we say: 'The workers against imperialist wars.'

In the misery-laden atmosphere, with the unemployment totalling thirty-five millions, not a few are led astray by the imperialist war provocateurs and war makers, through the illusion that massacres of the peoples will provide bread. Men and women whose years have suffered bitter want, who have often hungered and frozen for months together without bread or shelter, find employment in war industries. Their propertyless , exploited slave existence compels them to hard servile labour there. The boom in the armament industry allows its controlling, profit-swallowing 'magnates' to pay to individual working men and women and clerks, and to small groups of them, higher wages for overtime and premiums for special output. Such expenditure is tainted with the corruption of bribery for the purpose of splitting the workers and crippling their power of resistance to imperialst wars; they are insurance premiums paid for carrying through the latter. The growth of the armament madness of the bourgeois states increases their miltary budgets and their need for revenue. For what those employed in the armament industry take home as wages, the masses of the workers must pay in taxes and through tariffs.

TOGETHER LET US ALL WORK TOGETHER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

GENERAL STRIKE - ERIC DROOKER

AWAKENING!

Trees offer shelter
as spring gives promise
and we go mad with song.
Blue haze and mist
comes creeping, wraps around
whispers protection.
Images of broken light
gently obstruct
barricades still being formed.
Far beyond stars move
look down
nature finds a soul,a voice.
From distant borders
winds scatter delusions
pokes in corners
shoots out branches ,earth answers back.
Petal bombs explode
sending magic echoes into dark clouds
buds wake early to greet the dawn.
Time drifts alongside never forgetting what is lost,
digging away the ground beneath our feet
epic heartbeats rise and fall.
New cadences sap and spin towards the infinite
shadows irreversibally change the paradox of seeing
a choreographed bloom, effortlessly rearranged.

A Poem Like a Grenade. - John Haines ((June 29, 1924 – March 2, 2011)

John Meade Haines, who was born n Norfolk, Virginia, published nine  collections of poetry and numerous works of nonfiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book ' The Stars,The Snow, The Fire.
In May 1947 he decided to move to Alaska, which had a decisive effect on his life and work.
He built a cabin on a deserted hillside above the Tanana River about 70 miles southeast of Farbanks in a spotso remote that he claimed ne could walk north from his homestead all the way to the Artic Ocean and never cross a road or encounter a village.
LivIng alone most of the tme, Haines spent 25 of the next 42 years in the Alaskan interior. In this isolated landscape he would become self-reliant largely supporting himself through hunting and trapping.
He had to relearn what his ancestors knew, how to live off the land. Working as a hunter, grdener, fisherman, trapper and homesteader. He also used these solitary years to master another primitive craft,making poems.
He was appointed the Poet Laureate of Alaska in 1969. A collection of critical essays about his poetry The Wilderness of Vision,  was published  in 1998. He went on to teach graduate level and honors English classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He died in Fairbanks, Alaska aged 86.
Alaska has lost one of its most creative minds.  singular and prophetic  voice of the times and the world in which we live.

A Poem like a Grenade

It is made to be rolled down
a flight of stairs,
placed under a guilty hat,
or casually dropped into a basket
among the desks
of the wrongheaded statesmen.

As it tumbles on the carpeted stairs
or settles quietly
in its wire-wicker nest,
it begins to unfold,
a ragged flower whose raw petals
burn and scar...

Its wastepaper soil catches fire,
the hat is blown from its hook.
Five or six faces are suddenly,
permanently changed...

There will be many poems written
in the shape of a grenade-
one hard piece of metal flying off
might even topple a government.

Y Ddraig Goch - Henry Treece (22/12/11 - 19/6/66 )

Henry Treece was a midlander of Welsh parentage who was particularly known as a childrens novelist, but also wrote  adult historical novels.
Dragons are leader, but are prone to slumber until aroused, then it is a force to be reckoned with, powerful and mysterious. Beware, one  woken inspires action. Slays apathy.
Dydd Dewi Sant hapus/ Happy St David's Day

The dragon of our dreams roared in the hills
That ring the sunlit land of children's songs.
Red with the lacquer of a fairy tale,
His fiery breath fried all besieging knights.
Whole seasons could he lay the land in waste
By puffing once upon the standing corn!

He was our dragon dressed in red, who kept
Sly ghosts from lurking underneath the thatch,
And made the hen lay dark-brown eggs for tea.
One word to him, just as you went to bed,
Made Twm, the postman, call next afternoon;
"Ho, Bachgen," That is what he'd say, "Just look,
A fine blue postal-order from your Mam!
Twm gets a pint for being that, I bet!"

The dragon cured us when the measles came,
And let the mare drop me a coal-black foal.
He taught us where nests lay, and found us fish,
Then thawed the snow to save the winter lamb.

Ho, Ddraig Goch, my pretty, pretty friend!
We were his children, knowing all his ways;
We laid out nightly gifts beneath the hedge,
Five linnet's eggs, a cup, a broken whip,
And heard his gracious sighs sweep through the trees.
But tears for all the fools who called him false!
One lad who sniggered fell down Parry's well;
The English Parson had a plague of warts;
Old Mrs Hughes was bitten by a cat;
The school roof fell in when the teacher smiled!

Ho, Ddraig Goch, they tell me you are dead;
They say heard you weeping in the hills
For all your children gone to London Town.
They say your tears set Tawe in a flood.
I'm older now, but still I like to think
Of your grat green glass-green eyes fixed on the Fferm,
Guarding the children, keeping them from harm.

Don't die, old dragon, wait a few years more,
I shall come back and bring you boys to love.

Picture of Henry Treece.