Thich Nhat Hanh (b.11/11/26) If You are a Poet

                                             
                              ' If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud
                                floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will
                                    be no rain, without rain, the trees cannot grow; and
                                     without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is
                                      essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not
                                          here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.       

                                                    ( for my grandson
                                                     on his first birthday, 
                                                     heddwch/peace..)                 

What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes - Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings

I was talking to a friend of mine
Said he don't want no war no more
They're building bombs while are schools are falling
Tell me what in hell we're paying taxes for

What if we stopped paying taxes?
Now, what if we all stopped paying taxes?
Stop paying taxes y'all

Now tell  me who's gonna buy their bombs
Their tanks, their planes and all their guns
Well, tell me who's gonna pay for their wars
If we all get together and cut their funds

Listen peopl, listen to what I got to say
What if we all stopped paying taxes?
Now what if we all stopped paying taxes?
Stop paying taxes y'all

There's something on my mind and I think I've got to let it out

They may take nothing from us
That we aint ready ro give
How can we talk about the price of gas
When they're stealing our brothers and sisters right to live

What if we all stopped paying taxes?
Now, what if we all stopped paying taxes?
Stop paying taxes y'all

What if we all stopped paying taxes?
Now what if we all stopped paying taxes?
Sstop paying taxes y'all

http://stopwar.org.uk/
 

Steps

As Big Ben stood silent,it felt out of sync,
too many things are happening at the moment,
the spirit of meaness rustling in the breeze,
but if you like choreography, carry on regardless,
follow restrictions, orders metered out.
In the embers, no happy ending,
in the end what unites us, is what divides,
persistent barks that light tomorrows fuse,
and if you like surprises, look away,
                                        close your eyes,
because in serious times, uncertainty,
becomes jagged and dangerous.
The sky of our hearts,always glimmers,
beyond the cages,and the shackles ,
that are provided,
moving fast,in rythmic pulse,
beyond the ideologies of ruin,
waiting is a game the patient play,
some of us choking now,
don't have time to stand in line,
twitching behind our curtains,
our hearts sing,
listing our intentions,
unpeeling the spin of ugliness,
we write messages, that dream of escape,
on building blocks of longing.
Moving on, moving on,
invisible branches taking root,
past the slurry of memory,
we take back from yesterday,
what has been stolen,
resiliance swims against the odds.

Palestinian Prisoners Day

Today marks Palestinian Prisoners Day, a day that also serves to mark the ongoing perserverence of the Palestinian peoples relentless struggle for peace, justice, freedom and dignity. It is also used to
to illustrate the Israeli army's excessive and often lethal use of force against peaceful and unarmed demonstrators throughout the West Bank and Gaza .
One Palestinian prisoner Samer Isaawi  who I written about previously has been on hunger strike in an Israeli detention centre for 270 days, one of the longest hunger strikers in history. He has refused Israeli offers to be exiled to Gaza and other UN countries, firmly insisting that he will be either released to his home in Jerusalem or starve to death.

                                                 Samer Issawi

Palestinian Prisoner Day was founded to remind the world of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners imprisoned in Israeli prisons or detention centers without charge or trial for extensive periods of time. The number of Palestinian detainess increases as Israeli occupying forces continue to wage campaigns of arbitrary arrests and detentions against thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continue to be subject to wide-ranging violations of their rights
and dignity.
There are5,000 Palestinian poluitical prisoners incarcenated in 27 Israeli prisons, jails, detention centres and interrogation centres.
The numbers of Palestinian women detained has also increased,which amounts to 14 with a Lisa Jarbouni bring the longest serving prisoner, so far held for 11 years out of her 20 year sentence. There are 235 child prisoners and 200 administrative detainess.
Investigations have revealed that prisoners are regularly subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including poor detention conditions, in violation of Israel's obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law.
This is why I support the Palestinian prisoners, and continue  to support the international communities efforts to ensure the immediate and effective measures to ensure that Israel releases all unlawfully detaned prisoners, and ensures that conditions of arrest are consistent with international human rights and humanitarian law.

Palestinians Behind Bars: Prisoners Without Human Rights 

Thatcher's Prayer

 

 

Loathed by the people, loved by dicators, traitors, robbers of the poor and architects of apartheid. F**K Thatcher and anyone who remembers her fondly. She had a heart of stone, I thank her for nothing.

Culloden : Shoulder of Lamentation

On 16th April 1746, the Duke of Cumberland wiped up the rump of Bonnie Prince Charlie's army of Stuart hopefuls. Charles Edward Stuart was trying to win the British throne for his father James, son of James 11, and tried to capitalise on the understrength English army. He had made it as far south as Derby, but because of lack of support he was forced to turn round, and when defeat came he was back in the Highlands, at Culloden Moor near Inverness. The Battle of Culloden was the last full-scale land battle to be fought in Britain. It has since been remembered in many songs and verse.
It is also a place cited as one of the various origins of the Curse of Scotland, a tag given to the nine of diamonds http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow_curse.htm.
A memorial has been held on the Sunday nearest the 16th since the 1920's, on the cairn at the site of the Battle.
Many thousands were butchered as they ran, died in prison, executed or died in transport to the colonies Subsequently the culture and language of the Gaels was brutally suppressed, closely followed by  the Scottish clearances. So Culloden has become a site of pilgrimage and lamentation, functioning as a place to try and decode the Scottish identity and the Scottish nation. For the Scots  it has marked more than two centuries of tragedy and loss. It has become a landscape of loss and mourning. It speaks too of the larger Scottish diaspora, and has become a focus  for the collective  memory of the Scots.
Many Scots still shed a tear, for the noble sacrifice of the many Jacobite who fell.
In recent years the Scots soul has been rekindled and reawakenened, long may it soar.

Culloden (clip from 1964 docudrama , The Battle Of Culloden)

The Ghosts of Culloden - Isla Grant

Poem for the Hillsborough disaster by Carol Ann Duffy

The 96 Liverpool supporters who lost their lives at Hillsborough, 24 years ago were remembered in the anniversary memorial service yesterday. A memorial was unveiled at Old Haymarket and an antique clock was installed at Liverpool Town hall and set at 15.06 the time of the tragedy.
Families will gather at Anfield later today for an annual memorial service , a minutes silence will be held, with the names of the 96 fans who died read out, and a candle lit in memory of each victim.
The truth of what people have been saying for 24 years is finally emerging with the undeniable truth now recovered and revealed , and the fight for justice is reaching a conclusion.
Here is a touching poem by Carol Ann Duffy about the Hillsborough disater.

The Cathedral bell, tolled, could never tell;

nor the Liver Birds, mute in their stone spell;

or the Mersey, though seagulls waild, cursed, overhead,

in no language for the slandered dead...

not the raw, red throat of the Kop, keening,

or the cops' words censored of meaning;

not the clock, slow handclapping the coroner's deadline,

or the memo to Thatcher, or the tabloid headline...

but fathers told of their daughters; the names of sons

on the lips of their mothers like prayers; lost ones

honoured for bitter years by orphan, cousin, wife-

not a matter of footbal, but of life.

Over this great city, light after dark;

truth, the sweet silver song of the lark.

Samer Issawi's 'hunger speech' to Israelis

                                                                 
                                                             Samer Issawi

Reprinted from Youth Against Settlements,
http://hyas.ps/en/index.php/en/k2--category/settlements/item/148-hunger-speech-by-samer-issawi
Hunger Speech by Samer Issawi

Israelis:
I am Samer Issawi on hunger strike for eight consecutive months, laying in one of your hospitals called Kaplan. On my body is a medical devise connected to a surveillance room operating 24 hours a day. My heartbeats are slow and quiet and may stop at any minute, and everybody, doctors, officials and intelligence officers are waiting for my swtback and my loss of life.

I chose to write to you: intellectuals, writers, lawyers and journalist associations, and civil society activists. I invite you to visit me, to see a skeleton tied to his hospital bed, and around him three exhausted jailers. Sometimes they have their appetizing food and drinks around me.
The jailers watch my suffering, my loss of weight and my gradual melting. They often look at thei watches, asking themselves in surprise; how does this damaged body have an excess of time to live after its time?

Israelis:

I'm looking for an intellectual who is through shadowboxing, or talking to his face in mirrors. I want him to stare into my face and observe my coma, to wipe the gunpowder off his  pen, and from his mind the sound of bullets, he will then see my features carved deep in his eyes, I'll see him and he'll see me, I'jj see him nervous about the questions of the future, and he'll see me, a ghost that stays with him and doesn't leave.

You may receive instructions to write a romantic story about me, and you could do that easily after removing my humanity from me, you will watch a creature with nothing but a ribcage, breathing and choking with hunger, losing consciousness oncein a while.

And, after your cold silence, Mine will be a literary or media story that you add to your curricula, and when your students grow up they will believe that the Palestinian dies of hunger in front of Gilad's Israel sword, and you would then rejoice in this funerary ritual and your cultural and moral superiority.

Israelis:

I am Samer Issawi the young "Arboush" man according to your military terms, the Jerusalemite, whom you arrested without charge, except for leaving Jerusalem to the suburbs of Jerusalem. I, whom will be tried twice for a charge without charge, because it is the military that rules in your country, and the intelligence apparatus that decides, and all other componements of Israeli society ever have to do is sit in a trench and hide in the fort that keeps what is called a purity of identity - to avoid the explosion of my suspicious bones.

I have not heard one of you interfere to stop the loud wail of death, as if everyone of you has turned into gravediggers, and everyone wears his military suit: the judge, the writer, the intellectual, the journalist, the merchant, the academic, and the poet. And I cannot believe that a whole society was turned into guards over my death and my life, or guardians over settlers whose chase after my dreams and my trees.

Israelis:

I will die satisfied. I do not accept to be deported out of my homeland. I do not accept your courts and your arbitrary rule. If you had passed over in Easter to my country and destroyed it in the names of God of an ancient time, you will not Passover to my elegant soul which has declared disobedience. It has healed and flew and celebrated all the time that you lack. Maybe then you will understand that awareness of freedom is stronger than the awareness of deatrh.
Do not listen to those generals and those dusty myths, for the defeated will not remain defeated, and the victor will not remain a victor. History isn't only measured by battles, massacres and prisons, but by peace with the Other and the self.

Israelis:

Listen to my voice, the voice of our time and yours! Liberate yourselves of the excess of greedy power! Do not remain prisoners of miliary camps and the iron doors that have shut your minds! I am not waiting for a jailer to release me, I'm waitng for you to be released from my memory.

Bedroom Tax Song: You Cannae Have A Spare Rom in a Pokey Cooncil Flat.

 

A song about the Bedroom Tax, written for the demos that have occurred all over the UK, . and te Glasgow one in particular.
Set to the tune of the 1960's folk song "The Jeely Palce Song", by Scottish singer songwriter Adam McNaughton.

LYRICS

I'm a welfare state wean, we ive on the bottom flair
But we're not allowed to live there any mair.
They say we've got too many rooms, in our social rented flat
We've an eight by ten foot boxroom where you cannae swing a cat.

Chorus

Oh ye canna have a spare room in a pokey cooncil flat
Ian Duncan Smith and Co have put an end tae that
They say 'live in a smaller house', they say that is their plan
When the odds against you finding one are ninety-nine to one

Noo ma auties in a wheelchair, but these Tories dinna care
They say they have a deficit, she got to pay her share
£60 a month they'll take, then leave her tae her fate
Whilst gieing millionaires a tax cut, cause they say they're due a
break

Noo that Buckingham Palace looks a pretty roomy gaff
And the ludger there gets benefits at rates that make me laugh
A civil list, plus perks, worth nearly ninety million pounds
With her other dozen mansions lying empty a year round

Noon those MPs doon in Westminster must think we're dense
Wi their second home apartments, where the public pays their rent
They're even get a food allowance, two hubdred quid a week
But they're claiming we're the scroungers, is their arse up in their
cheeks?

So we've formed a Federation  amd we're gonna have our say
The Bedroom Tax it has to go, and we aint gonna pay
We're gonna march to George's square to demand our civil rights
Like nae mair Tories and that Liberal shite.

Au Caberet du Ciel, Paris, 1927 - Man Ray

  

Can't seem to avoid a certain somebody, showering down from nearly every newspaper I look at, every tiny bit of news I see, so heres's something completely different.
The cabaret scene shown was intended for reproduction in Varietes, a Belgian publication dedicated to Surrealism. Depicted are among the leading thinkers, writers and artists who reflected the Surrealist spirit in their work.
These include, standing:
Hans Arp, JJean Caupenne, Georges Sadoul, Andre Breton, Pierre Unik, Yves Tanguy, Cora, Andre Thirion ( shown from behind, facing Cora), Rene Crevel, Suzanne Musard, and Frederic Megret (shown with cigarette).
Seated at the front of the table are Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon, Camille Goemans and Madame Goemans.

More on a Surrealist thread coming Sunday.