Sea Captain Pia Klemp refuses ‘hypocritical honour’ awarded to her by the city of Paris

A human rights activist, biologist, and  and one of the German captains of  the German migrant rescue organization Sea Watch that has saved the lives of many migrants in the Mediterranean in maritime distress on their dangerous route to safety in Europe has turned down Paris’s highest civilian award, the Grand Vermei accusing the city of hypocrisy over the treatment of migrants.
Pia Klemp, 35, captained the Iuventa for the German charity Youth Rescue before working with nongovernmental organization  Sea Watch in 2017. Between August 2016 and August 2017 the Iuventa formerly a fishing vessel, is estimated to have saved 14,000 people from a watery grave off the coast of Libya.
The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, had announced on July 12th her wish to award the Grand Vermeil medal (the highest grade of decorations) to the two German Sea Watch captains, Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp, for their repeated bravery in bringing migrants to shore despite Italian efforts to stop them.
For years, authorities there have railed against work by rescue organizations like Sea Watch that pick up stranded migrants fleeing the Libyan coast for Europe. More recently, Italy's populist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini introduced a controversial security decree banning NGO migrant ships from entering Italian ports. As a result, on August 2 2017 the Italian authorities “pre-emptively” seized the ship while it was docked in Lampedusa and, without providing any evidence, accused Klemp and her team  of aiding human trafficking.
Carola Rackete was arrested in Italy at the end of June before being released for having forcibly landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa and landed the 40 migrants who had been on her boat for more than two weeks. A broad support movement had been expressed, and some 1.4 million euros had been collected in a few days via the internet to pay its legal costs and finance the continuation of the activities of the German NGO.
Now Pia Klemp, from Bonn, Germany, who is also the executive director of Aquascope, an organization that works to combat illegal fishing. for her efforts,  is getting ready to stand trial and reportedly faces up to 20 years in prison in Italy, for plucking desperate people out of the water in an act of humanity, but the hardline anti-immigrant government accused her of assisting illegal immigration.
Originally a biologist she joined Sea Shepherd because direct action is now the only way left to deal with the illegal activities on our oceans that are sanctioned by filthy greedy governments. It’s unusual  for a woman to be a boat captain. According to Sea Shepherd, only one percent of the boats in the world are captained by women.
Whilst on Sea Shepard duty as the ship’s captain she started rescuing migrants lost on the high seas.
She said that she believed that saving drowning people is a duty: “For every captain this is the duty,” she told Sea Watch. “Apart from that it should be self understandable for overprivileged Europeans like us.” On her Facebook page late on Tuesday night she explained why she refused the decoration of the City of Paris, citing the city’s treatment of refugees  and telling  Mayor Anne Hidalgo that the city was brimming with hypocrisy.
Klemp's refusal to accept the medal comes on the heels of a 19-day standoff between a Spanish rescue ship called Open Arms and the Italian government. On Tuesday an Italian court ordered the seizure of the ship and the evacuation of everyone onboard on Lampedusa. Five countries belonging to the European Union have agreed to accept the migrants.
Both the German and French governments have criticized Italy over the treatment of migrants, Klemp and Rackete. Salvini's retort is that the EU's other 27 member countries should open their borders to welcome the influx.

"Paris, I love you. I love you for all the free and solidarian people that live in you. Fighting for their freedom everyday, standing shoulder to shoulder, distributing blankets, friendship and solidarity. I love you for those who are sharing their homes, love and struggles everyday - regardless of their nationality, regardless if they have papers or not.
Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my solidarian action in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews 'work to rescue migrants from difficult conditions on a daily basis'. At the same time your police is stealing blankets from people that you force to live on the streets, while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts. I am sure you won't be surprised that I decline the medaille Grand Vermeil.
Paris, I'm not a humanitarian. I am not there to 'aid'. I stand with you in solidarity. We do not need medals. We do not need authorities deciding about who is a 'hero' and who is 'illegal'. In fact they are in no position to make this call, because we are all equal.
What we need are freedom and rights. It is time we call out hypocrite honorings and fill the void with social justice. It is time we cast all medals into spearheads of revolution!
Documents and housing for all!
Freedom of movement and residence!
Pia Klemp August 2019

"Paris, je t’aime. Je t’aime pour tous les gens libres et solidaires qui vivent en ton sein. Des gens qui se battent pour la liberté chaque jour, debout, bras dessus bras dessous, distribuant des couvertures, de l’amitié et de la solidarité. Je t’aime pour ceux qui partagent leur logement, leur amour et leurs luttes chaque jour, sans se soucier de la nationalité des personnes ni de savoir si elles ont des papiers ou pas.
Madame Hidalgo, vous voulez me décorer pour mon action solidaire en mer Méditerranée, parce que nos équipages « travaillent quotidiennement à sauver des migrants dans des conditions difficiles ». Simultanément votre police vole les couvertures de gens contraints de vivre dans la rue, pendant que vous réprimez des manifestations et criminalisez des personnes qui défendent les droits des migrants et des demandeurs d’asile. Vous voulez me donner une médaille pour des actions que vous combattez à l’intérieur de vos propres remparts. Je suis sûre que vous ne serez pas surprise de me voir refuser votre médaille Grand Vermeil.
Paris, je ne suis pas une humanitaire. Je ne suis pas là pour « aider ». Je suis solidaire à tes côtés. Nous n’avons pas besoin de médailles. Nous n’avons pas besoin de pouvoirs décidant qui est un « héro » et qui est « illégal ». En fait, il n’y a pas lieu de faire cela, car nous sommes tous égaux.
Ce dont nous avons besoin, c’est de liberté et de droits. Il est temps de dénoncer les honneurs hypocrites et de combler le vide par la justice sociale. Il est temps que toutes les médailles soient lancées comme des fers de lance de la révolution!
Papiers et logements pour toutes et tous!
Liberté de circulation et d'installation!
Pia KLEMP, 20 août 2019

 For updates on the Iuventa 10 or to donate to their legal fight, visit their website: iuventa10.org/en.

and here is a link to Sea Watch where you can sign a petition to free fellow captain Carola Rackete:

https://sea-watch.org/en/

Why I fight for solidarity - Pia Klemp

The continuing legacy of Poet Frederico Garcia Lorca ( 5/6/1896 -19/8/36 )

Frederico Garcia Lorca  poet, playwright, musician and social activist was born on 5 June 1898 in the village of Fuente Vaqeurtos in the province of Granada, a man ahead of his time, avant gardist, homosexual and restless traveller, the most  gypsy of poets , a term he rejected, friend of surrealists, developing his own ingenious style, full of lyrical freshness and spontaneity. His poems  painted a vivid and intrinsic poetical portrait of Spain and the region of Andalucía in particular. A poet of the universal, who used his voice to speak about love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice, and also the most international, saying - ' I sing to Spain, and I feel her to the core of my being, but above all Iam a man of the world and brother of everyone.' 

It should be remembered that before being a poet, Lorca was a musician. “First of all, I am a musician,” he once said in an interview. “I’m crazy about songs,” he said in another. His musical training came before any other, but above all, his passion for music palpitated at an early age and marked his entire life, including his conception of poetry. The musicality of Lorca’s lyrics was his hallmark, as can already be seen in some of his early books, such as First Songs and Songs. These contain short compositions that correspond in many cases to poetic structures of popular songs. The elements of folk music run through his poetry and find their maximum splendor in Gypsy Ballads and Poema del cante jondo.  Lorca was always grateful to one of his great teachers, Antonio Segura. This pianist from Granada was his piano teacher when the Lorca family moved from Fuente Vaqueros to Granada. According to the poet, Segura was the one who introduced him to “folkloric science.”

 Lorca, who deeply admired Beethoven, had extraordinary musical skills, that is to say, a magnificent ear and a wonderful technique at the piano. Thanks to Segura and his own instinct, from a very young age he developed a love of the folklore that he imbibed from the wet nurses who were part of the household and who told him stories and sang lullabies. From all this, Lorca emerged a wonderfully musical being — to the point that at the Madrid Student Residence he captivated everyone when he played the piano, even more so than with his poems. To talk about Lorca is, therefore, also to talk about music. 

These days, this link can be seen in a stupendous play, Federico García, directed and performed by Pep Tosar at Teatro Pavón in Madrid. The production evidences that the best way to explain Lorca is by using narrative elements such as flamenco guitars, singing and dancing. He was the poet of rhythm and of the duende, the spark that illuminates music. The string of musical admirers who have drawn on Lorca for their creations is long and seemingly endless: Camarón de la Isla, Paco de Lucía, Enrique Morente, Lole and Manuel, Carlos Cano, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Ben Sidran, Ana Belén, Lagartija Nick, Los Planetas… And yet, the point is not to underscore that unbreakable relationship between Lorca and music, but to highlight his musical universe, his contribution to Spanish popular music.

In 1919, at age 21, Lorca moved from his hometown Granada to Madrid to study Philosophy and Law at the Residencia de Estudiantes. At university, he  became associated with a group of artists who would become known as Generación del 27, including the painter Salvadore Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, and the poet Rafael Alberti  and began publishing poetry in various volumes.

In 1927, his play Mariana Pineda ,which had scenic designs painted by Dalí , opened to great acclaim in Barcelona. Lorca rose quickly, assuming his position as eccentric poet and dramatist, but struggled with the balance of his public and private lives. His homosexuality was a point of contention and allegedly damaged his friendship with Dalí.

Following the advice of his family, Lorca left Spain in 1929, on the RMS Olympic transatlantic cruiser, and headed for New York City. At that time he'd also published "Canciones" (1927) and "Primer romancero gitano" (1928); this is his most accessible and popular book. During this trip he writes "Poeta en Nueva York", one of his most famous books. His New York poems are harsh and difficult at times, at others erotic and exhilarating. In 1930 he travels to Cuba, where he'd write a considerable part of his texts.

He returned to Spain after a year abroad and became director of the student theatre La Barraca. Between 1933 and 1936 he wrote his most prolific work: Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just two months before his untimely death. These three popular works became known as the rural trilogy, exploring class, status and gender conventions.

In 1933 he traveled to Argentina to promote the staging of some of his plays by Lola Membrive's theatre company, and to give a series of conferences. His stay in Argentina was a great success: his staging of "La dama boba" by Lope de Vega attracted over 60 thousand people.

In 1933 he also co-founded the "Asociación de Amigos de la Unión Soviética", and between that year and 1936 he wrote "Divan de Tamarit" and "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías", which moved the whole Hispanic world. His theatre company La Barraca travelled across rural Spain, presenting his plays in village squares and small towns. Like his poetry, they found inspiration in the popular traditions of the south, and in particular in the flamenco music of Andalucia.

Over his short career in the public eye, Lorca built a reputation both at home and abroad as a passionate individual who  believed that the purpose of theatre was to question and challenge societal norms, and express the individualism at the core of the artist’s heart.

‘A nation that does not support and encourage its theatre is — if not dead — dying; just as a theatre that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine colour of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself a theatre, but only a place for amusement,’ he said.

‘The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.’

By the time Lorca returned from Buenos Aires, where he’d been lecturing and directing the Argentine premiere of his play Blood Wedding, Spain was paralysed by political tensions. Death
had spilled out of the plaza de toros—the bullfighting arena—into the plazas of cities and villages, where the Nationalist uprising left bodies rotting in the streets. 
After being airlifted by Nazi Junkers transports across the Strait of Gibraltar, Franco’s army beat an unrelenting march northward toward Madrid, with the aid of German and Italian tanks and planes. Taking orders from superiors and incited by the sinister broadcasts of Lieutenant General Queipo de Llano in Seville, the uprising machine-gunned innocents, raped and branded women, and carried out mass executions of peasants. The soldiers of the Foreign Legion, who called themselves the bridegrooms of death, collected the ears of enemies, just as Franco had once done as a young soldier in Africa. Their battle cry was: “¡Viva la muerte!”—Long live death! 
In Lorca’s hometown of Granada, where he had fled to thinking he would be safer than in his adopted Madrid, long-simmering hatreds and rivalries boiled over,  and almost immediately after he had arrived, the area was seized by the Nationalist Fallangists. Falangist Escuadras Negras—Black Squads—began conducting summary executions, revealing a bloodlust among neighbors that rapidly left ravines threaded with shallow graves. 
In spite of carefully cultivating an apolitical stance,  someone once asked Lorca about his political preferences and he answered he felt Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist and monarchist at the same time. He never joined any of the political parties and never discriminated or severed his relationship with any of his friends for political reason  but despite this his association with the Republic made him a marked man. His plays also dealt with repression, and some anti-Catholic opinions in interviews made him a high profile target.
The conflict at the heart of his writing is between freedom and repression, represented by the Civil Guard that terrorised rural Spain for so long.

"Black are the horses.
The horseshoes are black.
On the dark capes glisten
stains of ink and wax.
Their skulls are leaden
which is why they do not weep.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal
where they go, they command
silences of dark rubber
and fears like fine sand..."

When push came to shove, after years of seeing deprivation in his country and abroad, it was clear where his sympathies lay, once saying 

" I will always be on the side of those who have nothing, and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. "

Despite going into hiding, the Fallangists hunted him down. Lorca was arrested on the same day his brother-in-law was assassinated. He was arrested and imprisoned, without trial and charge, and mercilessly tortured. On August 19th at around 3.00 a.m he was handcuffed to another prisoner ( a teacher). shortly before  dawn he was taken out along with the teacher and two bullfighters ( members of the Anarchist Trade Union CNT), three guards struck Lorca's body with the butts of their rifles, then he was shot, his body riddle with bullets. Some say he was  murdered because of his sexuality,  as well as his politics. The body of Frederico Garcia, one of the greatest poets and playwrights  of the twentieth century and  one of Spain's most prodigious sons was unceremoniously dumped in a hastily dug hole, soon to be a mass grave. Despite years of efforts his body  has never been found.The fascist forces then tried to erase his memory, burning and banning  his books. Lorca’s writing, considered deeply homoerotic, was banned until 1954.and the ban on all of his works was not fully rescinded until after the death of dictator General Franco in 1975.

 Few artists, have represented and embodied their nations collective spirit more than Lorca , which makes  the tragic account of his death all the more heartbreaking.

Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme, it seems he had foretold his own violent death, when he wrote  ' Then I realised I had been murdered. They  looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches - but they did not find me. They never found me. They never found me.'

He traced the Spanish tradition of bullfighting to the same fatalistic attraction to death. “Spain,” Lorca wrote, “is the only country where death is a national spectacle, the only one where death sounds long trumpet blasts at the coming of spring.”

One thing is for certain his life would not be forgotten. As Spain moved to democracy, Lorca rose to the fore again, his writings finding a new generation, his plays are mounted frequently all over the world and his voice still  belong to humanity. An emblem who gave his  life for Spain, a martyr of it's people. He once said ' I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed  to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.' 

During the last decade there have been several failed attempts to locate the poets grave with many believing that finding  the final resting place of Lorca, a voice of pluralism and tolerance, can help reconcile Spain with its tragic past. But many years after his death, and despite his short life,  his voice continues to ring out, where bullets were unable to silence him.

Today Frederico García Lorca is remembered as a martyr,  an international symbol of the politically oppressed, representing  all the dead of the Spanish Civil War and representing all victims of the terrible crimes committed by Franco's dictatorship , where Lorca was one victim of many. More than four hundred thousand Spaniards spent time in concentration camps between 1939 and 1947. And over the next three decades, Spaniards continued to be persecuted for political reasons; thousands were executed by firing squad and garrotte. Half a million fled the country. And in the jittery, transition to democracy after Franco's death, politicians adopted a don't look back policy, and in 1977, Spain's parliaament passed an amnesty law that sealed the past in what became known as the pacto de olvido, or pact of oblivion. 

Dictators can kill poets but Lorca remains one of the most influential creative voices of his time, who pioneered for a ‘new morality, a morality of complete freedom,’ through his work as a writer and artist. Lorca's work  is profoundly and revealingly Spanish, but at the same time universally human, and his poetical celebrations of passion, and desire live on. 

Frederico Garcia Lorca - Sonnet

I know that my profile will be serene
in the north of an unreflecting sky.
Mercury of vigil, chaste mirror
to break the pulse of my style.

For if ivy and the cool of linen
are the norm of the body I leave behind,
my profile in the sand will be the old
unblushing silence of a crocodile.

And though my tongue of frozen doves
will never taste of flame,
only of empty broom,

I'll be a free sign of oppressed norms
on the neck of the stiff branch
and in an ache of dahlias without end.

Largo espectro de plata conmovida
el viento de la noche suspirando,
abrió con mano gris mi vieja herida
y se alejó: yo estaba deseando.

Llaga de amor que me dará la vida
perpetua sangre y pura luz brotando.
Grieta en que Filomela enmudecida
tendrá bosque, dolor y nido blando.

¡Ay qué dulce rumor en mi cabeza!
Me tenderé junto a la flor sencilla
donde flota sin alma tu belleza.

Y el agua errante se pondrá amarilla,
mientras corre mi sangre en la maleza
mojada y olorosa de la orilla. 

 Frederico Garcia Lorca -  Before the Dawn

But like love
the archers
are blind

Upon the green night,
the piercing saetas
leave traces of warm
lily

The Keel of the moon
breaks through purple clouds
and their quivers
still with dew

Aye, but like love
the archers
are blind!

Stop the DSEI Arms Fair :- 3-15th September 2019

Every two years, one of the world's biggest arm fairs comes to London. This needs to be stopped. The DSEI arms fair is where arms companies showcase their weapons and make deadly deals with buyers from across the world, including those from countries with serious human rights problems.
The arms fair which is due to take  place from September 15-18, involves more than 1,000 companies and 30,000 attendees.This is where those who profit from war, repression and injustice do business. The results are felt around the world, as people are killed, economies are devastaed, refugees traumatised, and peaceful protest is crushed.
The full list of countries officially invited by the government to attend DSEI is here. But it’s a long list including many countries with appalling human rights records and/or currently engaged in conflict.
Just as fences are erected to stop victims from seeking refuge, fences have been erected outside London's Excel centre, to help the global arms trade to do business and fuel repression and  conflict across the globe.
We must stop these companies profiting from conflict and repression. Join people  week for a week of action in the run up to the arms fair to make it as difficult as possible for  the arms dealers from  going about their deadly business. 
A #StopArmingIsrael protest will kick off the week of protests. The call to action states that DSEI will:host a specially designated area for Israel’s arms companies to display and market their weapons – weapons which are labelled “battle-tested” due to them being tested on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Then, on 3 September, there’s a ‘Borders and Migration’ day of action. It asks people to:Join us, and bring your own placards, banners, and creative actions. There will be talks, performances and actions, celebrating the future we want to see, where migrants and refugees are welcomed, not arms dealers.
And it stresses that “solidarity smashes borders”.
There will also be a day of climate action on 6 September. Plan C and the Kurdish Solidarity Network are planning: workshops on social ecology and the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s eco-socialist paradigm, as well as Kurdish music and dancing.
The groups are planning on two days of action as part of an international #RiseUp4Rojava initiative (see more on the progressive revolution in Rojava, northern Syria, here). As its call states:
So if you stand against all the horrors of capitalist modernity, with its endless exploitation and domination, and countless gendered, class-based, racial and national violences, and if you desire a free and equal life for everyone everywhere, where we collectively, directly and democratically control our everyday lives, and can develop freely in ecological balance with the world around us, then join us on the 6th and 7th of September, and #RiseUp4Rojava.
On 7 September, this will be part of a Festival of Resistance. The festival points out that: 1 in 25 people in Newham are homeless. Instead of providing public housing, investing in public healthcare, and protecting workers rights, the government prefers to support an industry of death. One of the world’s largest arms fairs, DSEI, is returning to our doorstep (at the ExCel) and we’ll be there to resist! Support

Organised by Campaign Against the Arms Trade. More information below.

https://www.stopthearmsfair.org.uk/join-in/#

Karl Liebknecht, German Revolutionary Socialist (13/8/1871 – 15/1/ 1919)

 

Karl Liebknecht was a leading German revolutionary at the close of the First World War. who with Rosa Luuxemburg, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/01/remembering-rosa-luxemburg-100-years.html founded the Spartakist League and led opposition to WW1 in Germany.
Born on the 12th of August 1871 Liebknecht  was  the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht a leading German Socialist. During his law and political economy studies at Leipzig and Berlin Liebknecht himself developed Marxist views.
Before starting work as a lawyer Liebknecht served with the Imperial Pioneer Guards from 1893-94.  Moving to Berlin in 1898 his political activities increased; he took to defending people charged with political crimes and himself later spent 18 months in prison in 1907-08.  He joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1900 and married the same year to Julia Paradies. The couple had two sons and a daughter before Julia died in 1911. His father and August Bebel had been the co founders of the SPD, which started as an overtly Marxist party. It was the world's strongest and most influential workers' party until 1914, when it capitulated to nationalism and dispatched German workers to the trenches to kill fellow workers from other European countries.
In 1901 Liebknecht was elected to serve on Berlin's town council, a position he retained until 1913.
In 1912 he married Sophia Ryss,  who had graduated from the University of Heidelberg and he was elected to the Reichstag with the SPD. Karl Liebknecht became a leading figure in the anti-militarist section of the SDP. In 1907 he published Militarism and Anti-Militarism. In the book he argued: "Militarism is not specific to capitalism. It is moreover normal and necessary in every class-divided social order, of which the capitalist system is the last. Capitalism, of course, like every other class-divided social order, develops its own special variety of militarism; for militarism is by its very essence a means to an end, or to several ends, which differ according to the kind of social order in question and which can be attained according to this difference in different ways. This comes out not only in military organization, but also in the other features of militarism which manifest themselves when it carries out its tasks. The capitalist stage of development is best met with an army based on universal military service, an army which, though it is based on the people, is not a people’s army but an army hostile to the people, or at least one which is being built up in that direction."
 He then went on to argue why the socialist movement should concentrate on persuading young people to adopt the philosophy of anti-militarism:
 "Here is a great field full of the best hopes of the working-class, almost incalculable in its potential, whose cultivation must not at any cost wait upon the conversion of the backward sections of the adult proletariat. It is of course easier to influence the children of politically educated parents, but this does not mean that it is not possible, indeed a duty, to set to work also on the more difficult section of the proletarian youth. The need for agitation among young people is therefore beyond doubt. And since this agitation must operate with fundamentally different methods – in accordance with its object, that is, with the different conditions of life, the different level of understanding, the different interests and the different character of young people – it follows that it must be of a special character, that it must take a special place alongside the general work of agitation, and that it would be sensible to put it, at least to a certain degree, in the hands of special organizations."
 On 4th August, 1914, he  was the only member of the Reichstag who voted against Germany's participation in the First World War. He argued: "This war, which none of the peoples involved desired, was not started for the benefit of the German or of any other people. It is an Imperialist war, a war for capitalist domination of the world markets and for the political domination of the important countries in the interest of industrial and financial capitalism. Arising out of the armament race, it is a preventative war provoked by the German and Austrian war parties in the obscurity of semi-absolutism and of secret diplomacy.
Liebknecht was soon arguing in favour of a revolutionary uprising. The German state could not tolerate such opposition. Liebknecht, although 43 years old, was called up into the army, and was enlisted as an Armierungssoldat, a member of a military unit that provided labour to the fighting divisions and which consisted of men unwilling or not permitted to directly bear arms (for example, because of criminal records or poor health). In this role he experienced life on the Eastern Front and was directly involved in the clearing of the the rotting corpses of the dead, until he suffered physical collapse in October 1915.  and  he was allowed back to Germany as his health had become so poor.
Together with a small but increasing number of socialist opponents of the Social Democratic Party policy of Burgfrieden, including Luxemburg he founded the Group International which was later named the “Spartacist league.” ,Together he and Luxemburg provided the leadership for illegal opposition to the war. Liebknecht edited the famous  “Spartacus Letters,” the “official” organ of the subversive Spartakusbund. which was declared illegal but shared two of Liebknecht’s most important anti-war polemics  Klassenkampf gegen den Krieg ("Class War against the War") and Der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land ("The Main Enemy is in your own country")
In early 1916 Liebknecht was one of very few German politicians to publicly question the German government’s response to the massacre of Armenians by their Ottoman-Turkish allies. A day after raising this issue in the Reichstag, he was expelled from the parliamentary party (Reichstagsfraktion) of the Social Democratic Party because of his opposition to the war and criticism of the party leadership.
By 1916 opposition to the war among soldiers in the trenches and hungry civilians was growing, and Liebknecht and his comrades in the Spartacus grouping decided to raise the stakes. On 1 May 1916 they called an illegal demonstration in the Potsdam Square in Central Berlin; 10,000 people attended, including many women and young people. As a contemporary report describes, 'They were so numerous that the usual skirmishes with the police began right away. The cops... quickly became very nervous and began to drive the crowd back and forth with blows. Suddenly, at the head of the crowd, right in the middle of the square, the loud sonorous voice of Karl Liebknecht rang out: "Down with the war! Down with the government!"'
Liebknecht was arrested and jailed for four and a half years for sedition. He told the court, 'No general ever wore a uniform with as much honour as I will wear a prison uniform.' Such was the discontent in German society already that his sentencing prompted a strike by 55,000 metalworkers in Berlin. Liebknecht, now became an international symbol. For socialists in Britain and France his courage made it easier to oppose the official demonisation of all Germans as warmongers.
With the collapse of the German government in October 1918 Liebknecht was granted political amnesty by Max Von Baden. However with Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartacists, soon Liebknecht  was  campaigning again openly for revolution. While Luxemburg and others had formed in early 1916 the loosely organised, and repressed, Spartakus group, it was only as the revolution began to unfold that steps were made to bring together and organise the revolutionary forces into a party. The end of 1918 saw the formation of the Communist Party (KPD) with Liebknecht and Luxemburg being seen as its main public leaders.This new communist organization was quick to exploit the chaos that had swept Germany with defeat on the western front. They escalated demonstrations, with Liebknecht provocatively declaring on January 6th that the SPD government was no longer legitimate, and by January 12th the protests had reached such a size that the government called in the army to quell them and the revolt was soon bloodily suppressed by Friedrich Ebert;s Freikorps a far-right grouping of demobilised German soldiers (.Many future members and leaders of the Nazi party served in the Freikorps) and the revolt was defeated with some ease on Jan. 13, 1919.
Two days later, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested, interrogated and tortured. Liebknecht was put in a car and killed by a shot from behind. Luxemburg was beaten with rifle butts before she was shot. Her corpse was dumped in a Berlin canal.
At a memorial meeting in Petrograd a few days later, Leon Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the October Revolution, drew parallels with 1917 and spoke of how the German "bourgeoisie and military have learnt from our July and October experience" and acted to try to behead the revolution.
Their murders  decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place.
Both Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were true revolutionary heroes, and their ideas and legacy will be remembered down the ages,against  militarism, oppression, exploitation and privilege and .nothing can destroy the heritage of Liebknecht's revolutionary struggle against capitalism and war

"Memorial for Karl Liebknecht" by Käthe Kollwitz, 1921.

The not so glorious Twelfth.

The  so called Glorious Twelfth  is an event that takes place every year which has  a huge impact on Britain’s wild birds on the first day of the grouse shooting season as our beautiful. moorlands are turned into killing fields.
Popular among the elite and shooting enthusiasts, it's quite a profitable business estate owners generally receive £150 for every pair of birds shot down by individuals who take pleasure in pain and suffering, because rather than being killed instantly, thousands of birds will be left wounded and left to experience a lingering, painful death. Consequently it has  become a flashpoint for tensions between the game industry and conservationists.
Found in northern England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the iconic red grouse is shot in large numbers until the end of the season in December. Hunters either walk across the moorlands and taim at the startled grouse or shoot them out of the sky after they are beaten to the guns.The grouse don’t stand a chance, as it is basically a massacre. It is estimated that 100,000 birds are shot every day in the shooting season.
Gamekeepers also take unnatural steps  to boost the grouse population for the perverse purpose of obliterating the birds later in the year, a practice highly detrimental to the local environment. Because grouse thrive on young heather,where they can nest and hide from predators the peat land is burned to encourage a fresh batch.
These intensive burning practices are responsible for serious environmental damage which occurs primarily on protected areas with 90% of English grouse moors being found on National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The EMBER (Effects of Moorland Burning on the Eco hydrology of River basins) study by the University of Leeds found that burning had impacts on peat hydrology, peat chemistry and physical properties, river water chemistry and river ecology. The Committee on Climate Change estimates that around 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year are emitted from peat and the vast majority (260,000 tonnes) results from the burning of grouse moors.
Grouse shooting for 'sport' depends on intensive habitat management which increases flood risk and greenhouse gas emissions. It is not just grouse who suffer in the grouse hunting season  The British Association for Shooting and Conservation – a contradiction in terms if ever there were one – admits gamekeepers "control" (that is, kill) foxes, crows, weasels, stoats and other animals so hunters will have more grouse to shoot. Similarly, hawks, falcons, owls and other legally protected raptors are killed and have their nests destroyed to remove competition. No not a day then  I would consider that glorious.
Write to your MP and express your concern about 'game' bird shooting

The glorious Twelfth

To celebrate the glorious twelfth
privileged men head to the moorlands,
to shoot birds out of sky for fun
with no respect at all for life,
singing voices  they cruelly silence
wings to never take flight again,
innocence senselessly slaughtered
by morbid sadists seeking a thrill,
in the name of sport, tradition and pleasure
every year returning, yearning for a kill.

' Ruthless cull':Hundred of thousands of animals being killed on private estates to protect grouse shooting, Chris Packham says :-

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/grouse-shooting-chris-packham-protected-species-shot-gamekeepers-scotland-a9028361.html?fbclid=IwAR3RfyHwmtR0s3jARg73pgrWkkAB6bnWnWFFTUm3_2o00b_2tCNraxrG8Xk

A Distant Call - The Artisans

The above song  is available to download today https://theartisansmusic.bandcamp.com
With all  the proceeds going to be donated to Wild Justice, set up by leading environmentalists Chris Packham, Dr Mark Avery and Dr Ruth Tingay, to fight for wildlife. https://wildjustice.org.uk/

The video was created with the help of illustrator Mia Underwood, is designed to bring the songs lyrics to life ad to highlight  the devastating effect that driven grouse shooting has on the wildlife and the environment.

Reinvigorating Power (Dedicated to Oya, Yoruba deity )

Among different struggles and journeys
The vortex of feeling, labyrinths of deep thought, 
Whether poor or not, can get lost on rich imagination
As we trample along this battered fragile old earth,
Oya lady of the storms, black as the night
Dances with the winds, feminine to the core,
Strong and fierce creating hurricanes and tornadoes
She is the wild spirit beyond destruction, 
Turbulently unpredictable, beware of her power
Beyond reason, authentic and unique,
A weather goddess who waters the garden
To fertilise, make the land lush and green,
Rich juices, dripping deeply to endure
Creating seeds of transition and change,
With precision stripping away what must die
In order for the harvest to be abundant,
Elemental and rooted in the natural world
Occupying realms of rainbows and thunder,
Can either shelter us in her loving embrace 
Or strike us down with licentious lightening,
Allowing tempests to rise, whirl beside us 
In morning or twilight, lost in sybaritic storm,
On the brink of eternity, splashed with stars
Dawn till dusk, she will take our breath away.

Footnote:

Oya is one of the most powerful African Goddesses (Orishas), She is the sister/wife of the God Shango.The Dark Mother Goddess of Storms and Destruction  of the Yoruba People in West Africa as well as the Americas. In Yoruba, the name Oya means "she tore". She is known as Oya-iyansan, the "mother of nine" due to the River Niger ( known to the Yoruba as the Odo-Oya) which is known for having nine tributaries, where violent rainstorms are said to be the source. She is also worshiped In Brazil and Cuba and is associated with the Amazon whose source she is said to be. Her followers are distinguished by a particular kind of reddish beads that are always tied around their necks.When summoned by prayer she empowers mistreated women, and engenders feminine leadership.
Never ingratiating, she is also believed to protect and guide the dead as they make the transition to a new life. Using her machete, or sword of truth, she cuts through stagnation and clears the way for new growth, she does what needs to be done, a  powerful harbinger of change and transformation. She is similar to the Haitian God Maman Brigitte, who is syncretised with the Catholic Saint Brigit.

In Memoriam Kamal Boullata (1942 - 2019 ) Influential Palestinian artist and historian

Kamal Boullata influential Palestinian artist, historian, intellectual and writer who was acclaimed for his  intricate explorations of the concepts of exile, modernism and the emergence of Palestinian identity against colonial powers, has died in Berlin on August 6 at the age of 77. His death was first reported by the National, a publication about Middle Eastern culture based in the United Arab Emirates, on Tuesday.https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/prominent-palestinian-artist-kamal-boullata-dies-in-berlin-1.895390
Boullata was born in Jerusalem in 1942, growing up in the Christian Quarter and  his parents sent him to the workshop of painter Khalil Al-Halabi,who was well known for his paintings of icons, in the quarter where he lived, and it was with him that Boullata  would  learn the same process while studying the Arabic calligraphic and geometric aesthetics that would later influence his body of work. Following Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967, he was exiled to Beirut and later traveled to Europe where he graduated from the Academia di Belle Arte in Rome and then to the United States, where he studied at the Corcoran Art Museum School in Washington, DC and used  this time to make significant contributions to the cause of Palestinian activism and the Arab American awakening that was occurring at the time.
In the 1970's and 1980's he was a member of the hurufiyya movement, where Arab artists experimentally brought together Arabic calligraphy and Modernism. Boulatta  was best known for his colourful, geometric silkscreen artworks  and his use of Kufic script, an early form of Arabic calligraphy, where he addressed the concepts of binaries and divided identity, often including  clear visual references to the decorative elements of the Dome of the Rock, a site he frequently visited as a child in Jerusalem, as well as the traditions of Palestinian embroidery.
His later works moved away from geometry towards an interest in depicting light and transparency. In the following  video interview with the online publication Electronic Intifada, Boullata says “perhaps it was the light of Jerusalem that I have been seeking to recapture all along”.

Kamal Boullatta on painting, exile and Jerusalem

In 1993, he received a Fullbright Fellowship to conduct field research on Islamic art in Morocco and Spain, and in 2001, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to research post-Byzantine painting and the origins of modern art in Palestine. Boullata  was a worldly figure who spent the last five decades of his life moving between the US (1968-1992 , Morocco, (1993-1996) and France,  (1997-2012) before settling in Berlin in 2012 when he was elected as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskollen zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced in Berlin.
His career was rich and varied, moving regularly between the worlds of writing and of painting. Throughout his life  he was known for his generosity to friends, human rights advocates, and causes. He was the author of  four groundbreaking books on Palestinian art, including Belonging and Globalisation: Critical Essays in Contemporary Art and Culture  (2008 ) and Palestinian Art:From 1850 to the Present (2009) in which he gave  the first insider's study of Palestinian art in English yet published, this scholarly analysis presented insights into the development of Palestinian art before and after the cataclysmic events of 1948 during which Palestinian society was uprooted and dispersed. Writer and Critic John Berger wrote in its preface: "Boullata takes the reader to the struggle of those visionary, obstinate Palestinian artists who create so that their anonymous heroic land with its ancestral olive trees  may survive."
He believed that Palestinian artists who sat idly by had failed to do their job properly, and he saw writing such histories as being integral to his practice. “I don’t think that you can lead a purely creative life or a purely political life,” Boullata said in a 2009 National interview. “Everything is interrelated, even if we are unaware of that fact. When artists in Gaza were under bombardment and looking after their families, they still kept on thinking about art.” https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/visual-memories-a-new-book-on-palestinian-artists-1.4
An individual with a brilliant mind Boullata also edited books on modern poetry and contemporary culture and his essays in English and Arabic have appeared in catalogues, anthologies, and academic journals.In 2003 he edited  If Only the Sea Could Sleep: Love Poems by Adonis. We Begin Here a collection of poems he co-edited was written in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon,updated with new works rising from Israel's 2006 bombardment of its northern neighbor. These poems, covering a period of nearly 25 years, testified to the poets' spirit of resistance and support of the dignity, rights and humanity of the Palestinian and Lebanese people. 

 “The Palestinian cultural movement lost with the departure of Boullata a dedicated artist who will remain present in the history and future of Palestinian art as an expression of freedom, struggle and creativity and in the memory of Palestinian generations inspired by his works,” said the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in a eulogy statement.

“Boullata remained faithful to Palestine and its cause in its political and humanitarian dimensions. He defeated with his art the aura of darkness and death that the occupation is trying to consolidate and impose in Palestine,” it added.

Boullata’s works are well regarded around the world  and he has been exhibited in Europe, the US, France, and the Middle East and can be found in collections including the British Museum, London; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the New York Public Library; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and Mathaf:  Museum of Modern Arab Art, Doha. Recent solo exhibitions include Addolcendo at Meem Gallery, Dubai (2017); ‘… And There Was Light’ at Berloni Gallery in London (2015); and Bilqis at Wiensowski & Harbord in Berlin (2013).

His loss is a huge loss to the thousands of people he inspired across the world and to Palestinian culture, because he did so much in his work and his writings to situate Palestine art  in the full context of Palestinians lived experiences. He will be remembered foremost as one of Palestines great modernist artist, a creator of vibrant Arabic abstract art, as well as being a scholar of the history of Palestinian art,whose legacy will live on as a result of the rich contribution he has given to humanity,  He is survived by his wife  Lily Farhoud. Kamal Boullatta  may his creative soul rest in peace.

"Today, memory continues to be the connective tissue through which Palestinian identity is asserted and it is the fuel that replenishes the history of their cultural resistance." -- Kamal Boulatta

Kamal Boullata

Lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

74 years ago  on 6th August 1945 am.the United States dropped  an atomic bomb called ' Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan which is estimated to have killed 100,000 to 180,000 people out of a population of 350,000. Then three days later, a second  atomic bomb  called "Fat Man" was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing between 50,000 and 100,000 people.
.Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely civilian towns, meaning there wasn't a strong military reason to drop the atomic bombs over those particular cities. No one was excluded from the horrors of the atomic bomb, a "destroyer of worlds" burnt hotter than the sun. Some people were vaporised upon impact, while others suffered burns and radiation poisoning that would kill them days, weeks or even months later. Others were crushed by debris, burned by unimaginable heat or suffocated by the lack of oxygen. Many survivors suffered from leukemia and other cancers like thyroid and lung cancer at higher rates than those not exposed to the bombs. Mothers were more likely to  lose their children during pregnancy or shortly after birth. Children exposed to radiation were more likely to have learning disabilities and impaired growth.
Those that did manage to survive  would be traumatised for the rest of their lives. Hibakusha is a term widely used in Japan, that refers to the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it translates as 'explosion effected  Survivor of Light. These survivors speak of the deep, unabating grief they felt in the days, months and decades since the attack  They have described the shame of being a survivor , many were unable to marry, find jobs, or live any sort of normal life. They have said that many Hibakusha never speak of the day, instead choosing to suffer in silence. They told what it was like to be suddenly alone in middle age, to lose their parents, spouses, children, and livelihoods in a single instant. In memory of them, we should make sure that the  misery and devastation caused by nuclear weapons is never forgotten.
Even if Japan was not fully innocent, the people of Japan did not deserve to pay the price for their nations wrongdoing, and there was absolutely no moral justification in obliterating these two cities and killing its inhabitants in what was clearly a crime against humanity and murder on an epic scale. Hiroshima and Nagasaki held no strategic importance. Japan were an enemy on the brink of failure an members of the country's top leadership were involved in peace negotiations. Many believe that these two atrocities were a result of  geopolitical posturing at its most barbaric, announcing  in a catastrophic  display of military capability, of inhumane intention showing America's willingness to use doomsday weapons on civilian populations.The bombings serving as warnings and the fist act of the Cold War against its imperialist rival Russia. A message to the Russians of the power of destruction and technological military capability that the US had managed to develop.Three days later U.S president Harry Truman exulted ; "This is the greatest thing in history! " and gloated that " we are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely."
Then the photos began to emerge, haunting images of burned children with their skin hanging off, of bodies charred and there was Sadaki Sasaki and the 1,000 origami peace cranes she folded before her death at 12 from leukemia ten years after the bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. The bombs dropped were  of a indiscriminate and cruel character beyond comparison  with weapons and projectiles of the past. Despite all  this Truman never regretted his decision. .
Today as the world commemorates the lives that were lost and the unacceptable devastation caused to people and planet, we still have so much to learn from this picture of indescribable human suffering. Lets not forget that in our our current dangerous  times, many world leaders remain recklessly committed to their nuclear  arsenals. There are an estimated 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world at the present time with over 90% held by USA and Russia, but also by the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and lately North Korea. This is more than enough to wipe out most of the human race and most other life and in scrapping the landmark intermediate-Range nuclear arms control pact, like the  US president Donald Trump has done on August 2d, the threat of nuclear war has been dangerously heightened.
As the safety and security of people across the globe hangs by a thread, and today we mourn the hundreds and thousands of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki now is the time for us to redouble our efforts to ensure that such an atrocity does not happen again and on this poignant anniversary, we must reaffirm our determination to campaign for a world without nuclear weapons, whilst remembering the resilience of ordinary people in the years after the war and the movements of ordinary people against war, who try to make this world more peaceful and harmonious place for us all. Across the world today for Hiroshima Day and on August 9 Nagasaki Day there will be many Lanterns for Peace Ceremonies to commemorate these two events, where many will echo the call of the Hibakusha, that such a tragic thing must never happen again.

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

Roma  Holocaust Memorial Day is held every year on August 2, to remember the murder of hundreds of thousands of Romani by the Nazis during Word War II. Roma communities also mark May 16, 1944, when, as survivors remember, the inmates successfully resisted the SS’s first attempt to clear the camp .
No official figures exactly exist, but it is estimated that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti,from Central Europe were killed during the war, the Nazis and their allies killed about 25 percent of Europe's entire Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) population, accounting for half their total population at  the time. This genocide, known in the Romani language, as Porajimas which can translate as “destruction.” It's remembered as the worst event in their peoples' history. Other Romani people in the Balkans prefer to use the term 'samudaripen,' translating as “mass killing,” but there's still no general consensus in the community regarding how to call this tragedy, sometimes even borrowing the word 'holokausto.'
Roma persecution by the Nazi regime began in 1933 and during the 1936 Olympic Games, the Roma and Sinti were forcibly relocated to a camp on the outskirts and were not allowed to leave unless they had a job. Their property was confiscated and sold; they were never compensated. Between 1933 and 1945, more than 400,000 people were forcibly sterilised by the Nazis, including thousands of Roma and Sinti, In the late 1930s, the first deportations of Roma to concentration camps began. While the yellow star worn by the Jewish victims of the Holocaust is best known, the Roma had their own symbols, brown or black triangles, symbolising their ethnicity and their inherent ‘anti-social’ status.
In May 1944, the Nazis started to plan the “Final Solution” for the “Gypsy Family Camp” in Auschwitz. The initial date for the liquidation of the “Gypsy camp” was planned for the 16^th of May. The prisoners of the camp were ordered to stay in the barracks and surrounded by 60 SS men. When the SS men tried to force the prisoners out of the barracks they faced a rebellion of Roma men, women and children, armed with nothing more but sticks, tools and stones, and eventually the SS had to withdraw. The resistance of Roma prisoners gave them only a few additional months of life.
The Nazi also feared that an insurrection could spread to other parts of the camp and they planned the “Final Solution” on August 2nd. On orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler, a ban on leaving the barracks was imposed on the evening of August 2 in the “Gypsy Camp”. Despite resistance by the Roma, 2,897 men, women, and children were loaded on trucks, taken to gas chamber V, and exterminated. Their bodies were burned in pits next to the crematorium. After the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 only 4 Roma remained alive.
Auschwitz remains a powerful symbolic point of reference for European Roma , as it does, of course for global memory of the Holocaust. But even before this horrific moment in history the Roma were vilified, and maligned across Europe, an ethnic group originating in the northern Indian subcontinent before making their way to Europe most likely in the 14th century, the Roma had always been a migratory people who often faced local persecution wherever they ended up. And in the subsequent years since the Holocaust, their pain and suffering has been forgotten and diluted, wiped from the pages of history books while the same myths that were used to put them in camps in the first place persist into the 21st century. Widely accepted “facts” about Roma criminality and anti-social behaviour are today central to any conversation about the Roma community, despite a broad lack of understanding for the realities involved. The genocide of the Roma and the Sinti by the Nazis remains for many the "Forgotten Holocaust "
Surely  it is  time we should reject the notion that only the group with the highest number of victims deserves acknowledgement for their suffering.What matters most, in any case, is not the anomalies or the differences in the numbers, but the fact that both Jews and Gypsies were deemed “parasitic alien races” and targeted for racial extermination.It is certainly time for full recognition of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis. Just as Jews have Yom HaShoah, the Roma and Sinti have now their own commemoration  to fully recognize Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. Today organizations representing  the Roma and Sinti community will gather today at Auschwitz and other sites for education and remembrance.
We should not forget either,  that those who passed through the gates of Auschwitz were only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Romani victims of the genocidal policies of the Nazis and their allies. In occupied Poland, Serbia and the Soviet Union, they were hunted down by the same Wehrmacht units and death squads that massacred Jews. In Romania, some 25,000 were deported to “colonies” east of the Dniester river (Transnistria); nearly half of them did not survive the brutal conditions there.
After World War II, German society even denied for decades they had been persecuted and it took until 1979 for the German government to commence reparations and until 2011 for the killings to receive an official day of remembrance.However to this day the families of the victims of the Roma Holocaust still struggle for compensation and equal rights, while at same time institutional and rhetorical anti-Gypsyism is sadly becoming politically respectable in parts of Europe again. They face extreme unemployment and poverty. They have poor education outcomes, language and literacy barriers. They are segregated and discriminated against at every turn, but people are willing to turn a blind eye to all of that because it’s not happening to them.The need for continued memorialization of the fate of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe has never been more important.
Not just today we should pay tribute to the memory of the Roma victims of the Holocaust, making sure this tragedy is never repeated . It is  also a stark reminder of our shared responsibility and duty as fellow humans to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to counter antigypsyism, antisemitism, racism,discrimination and stand guard  against hatred and indifference and other forms of intolerance. Also in remembering the genocide is an important step towards securing respect and civil rights for Europe’s Sinti and Roma. a path to stop the racism against the Roma that has never stopped  for them and the pain that is still inflicted on their community that affects them so deeply.

Frank Stanford (1/8/48- 3/6/78 ) :- Neglected Poet of raw emotion

Prolific American poet Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi on August 1 in 1948, he was taken out of a Mississippi orphanage and was adopted by Dorthy Gildart, who was single. In 1950 his mother adopted a daughter Bettina Ruth, and in 1952, his mother married Albert Frankin, a much older civil engineer contractor in Memphis., Tennessee, where the family relocated, and Albert adopted Frank and his younger sister. Until his death eight years later, Stanford raised the young boy as his own. When he was 21, Frank discovered that his mother had adopted him he had always believed, or been led to believe, that she was his birth mother. His birth parents are unknown. The orphanage from which a single mother adopted him burst into flames, destroying his record.
 Standford spent summers in labor camps run by his father, and worked side by side with African Americans building levees on the Mississippi River, absorbing his co-workers’ vivid storytelling, their music and their fatalistic point of view. Asked once what he had learned from his co-workers, he said simply: “how shitty white people were to them.”
In 1964, Stanford entered Subiaco Abbey and Academy near Paris, Arkansas, a boys' prep-school run by Benedictine monks who provided a rigorous liberal arts and physical fitness curriculum. After graduating, he entered the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in the fall of 1966, pursuing a civil engineering degree as his stepfather had done at the same institution some fifty years earlier. In January 1969, the spring semester of his sophomore year, Stanford changed his field of study to English and was allowed to enroll in the graduate poetry-writing workshop, an uncommon occurrence.
Stanford‘s personal life  though was rather tumultuous, after leaving University without a degree in 1971,he married  Linda Mercin , but the marriage ended within a year. In 1973 he married a second time to painter Ginny Crouch. They had no children.His preoccupation with his loss of identity and his perpetual quest for identifying origins, manifested across his poetry. His subject was mostly childhood, and particularly the childhood spent growing up in a Southern community at a time when the South was on the brink of tumultuous change. He writes of childhood memories viewed through an adult lens, memories recalled with a grasp that is fond and loving but also understanding and at times shocking. Much of his poetry is about growing up in the 1950s South. His language soaked in a Southern vernacular and deeply American.Long poems set with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape drawn from his childhood in the Ozark mountains and full of wild embellishment.
Stanford was a writer unlike any other American poet of his time. He was heavily influenced by French and Latin American Surrealism, and he was dubbed "a swamprat Rimbaud" by the poet Lorenzo Thomas and "one of the great voices of death" by Franz Wright.Stanford consistently took two of the most ancient poetical themes, love and death, and infused them  with a freshness with his language and imagery. His poems remain haunting,primal, otherworldly and powerful to read, full of raw emotion and passion, and despite the preoccupation with death are strangely beautiful.
 On June 3, 1978, Stanford  walked into his home in Fayetteville, Ark., to be confronted by his wife, painter Ginny Stanford, and his mistress, poet C.D. Wright about his sexual liaisons. There were at least half a dozen other women at the time.After confesing his infidelity to his wife, he had suffered from depression and threatened suicide on previous occasions, he stepped into the bedroom and shot himself with a .22 pistol. He is buried at Saint Benedict's Cemetry near Subiaco Abbey.
 Stanford wrote ten books of poetry, eight volumes in the last seen years of his life, which is pretty impressive for anyone, his books include The Singing Knives, Ladies from Hell, Arkansas Bench Stone  and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I love you, a mostly unpunctuated poem that is more than 16,000 lines long.
He published prolifically and was acknowledged as one of  the most talented and uniquely  inventive poets of his generation, however after his death, with his literary estate split, a rift between his widow and his mistress left the majority of his work inaccessible to all  but determined seekers. But in the years following his death  there have been a number of posthumous collections, and though a underappreciated and neglected  artist, who has been almost entirely absent from poetry anthologies he has certainly developed a cult following,  and now with his books being republished, it has meant that  his legacy, in recent years, has at least continued to  grow and for him to be at last  recognised  as an undeniable force in contemporary American poetry. He cared about the lost and forgotten , the poor and afraid. And he bought them into his poems. where their despair and hoplessness could shine clearly. His poems should be a wake up call for all of us, and long shall they not be forgotten either.His grand imagination has flared in the imagination of a new generation of readers and writers and he has since been written about in at least two folk songs - the Indigo Girls' "Three Hits" and Lucinda Williams' beautiful song "Pineola" who was a close family friend of Stanford who was a staple in the Williams household in the 1970s.

The Light  the Dead See - Frank Standford

There are many people who come back
After the doctor has smoothed the sheet
Around their body
And left the room to make his call.

They die but they live.

They are called the dead who lived through their deaths,
And among my people
They are considered wise and honest.

They float out of their bodies
And light on the ceiling like a moth,
Watching the efforts of everyone around them.

The voices and the images of the living
Fade away.

A roar sucks them under
The wheels of a darkness without pain.
Off in the distance
There is someone
Like a signalman swinging a lantern.

The light grows, a white flower.
It becomes very intense, like music.

They see the faces of those they loved,
The truly dead who speak kindly.
They see their father sitting in a field.
The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended.
There is a towel around his neck,
The odor of bay rum.
Then they see their mother
Standing behind him with a pair of shears.
The wind is blowing.
She is cutting his hair.

The dead have told these stories
To the living.

 Time Forks Perpetually toward Innumerable Futures in Your Enemy - Frank Stanford

I am going to die.

Friends who made good,
Friends who did not,
I am going
Down into the Egypt of your sex,
The lands of your mystery and death.

Do you still want me
To find you
Somebody to love?

I cruise through the delta of your love,
Paradise on Sunday,
Cold as ice on Monday.
A hundred pounds of it on the tongs,
A butterfly at the center.

Going home I cross the bridge
And throw a bottle out the window,
Hit all my friends in the head.

The crickets under the straw
Like old folks spitting in a paper sack.

Now my life the Sphinx
Laid by slaves,
My death the promised land.

A light rain falling, a split tongue
And sad eyes, no lie,
I’ve got you by the tongue.

I park my Cadillac outside your temple of madness.
You are worshipped there.

Look at your face, swollen from sleep.
Are you waiting for me
To unwind you from your last clothes,
Do you want me
To bury my long ship in your heart?

Your lineage like gravesites for the stars,
Way stations for great dreamers.

There is a six foot rattlesnake
Asleep in the birdhouse.
Are you taking crumbs to the warblers tonight?

Death is an isthmus, you can get there on foot.
But love had made its island.

What of the young?
I hunt them down,
Good winds in the desert,
Blue eggs in the junipers.

You - Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

Frank Stanford, What About This:Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Port Townsend; Copper Canyon Press, 2015

Pineola - Lucinda Williams