FREEDOM - Pat Arrowsmith ( b.3/3/30)

Here at least, I thought,
I shall find freedom.
Here in prison all encumbrances
will be removed.
I shall be left without the burden of
possessions, responsibilities, relationships.
Alone and naked I shall feel
a fresh wind over my uncluttered body
blow each pore clear,
cooling and cleaning every crevice.

At last I shall know the relief of
simply obeying orders,
owning nothing,
caring for no-one.
being uncared for.

I shall sit content for hours on end
in a bare cell,
glad to be cut off from
things, people, commitments and the
confusing world outside.

But I was wrong.
There is no freedom here-
prison is the world in microcosm.

In my locker is a cache of valuables:
needle, cotton, nail-file, pencil.
My wages buy me fruit and biscuits which
I hoard and hide,
fearing they'll get stolen.

Meticulously I arrange the flowers that
outside friends send in:
with difficulty acquire a tin of shoe polish:
carefully decorate my cell with cut out pictures:
get flustered if I lose my mug or bucket.

I am no hermit from the outside world,
but strain through busy days to read
each item in the newspapers.
International problems follow me inside;
a prisoner is picked on - she is coloured.

Every evening I am forced to choose
betwen a range of recreations:
I may read or dance or take a bath,
go to class, play darts or
watch the news.

I am seldom on my own:
a geometry of love, hate, friendship
forms about me.
Someone calls my name,
enters my cell,
asks a favour,
makes some claim upon me.

And I marvel
as I lie alone at night
that this world is as complex as the other:
that even here in jail I am not free to
lose my freedom.


Holloway Prison, London, 1969

FROM:-

BREAKOUT

POEMS & DRAWINGS

FROM PRISON

BY PAT ARROSMITH

Published by Edinburgh Univesity Student Publications Board 1975_

Edward Hirsch (20/1/50) - In Spite of Everything, the Stars.

Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of dazed stones
floating overhead, or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,
like a conductor's expectant arm
about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler's plates defying gravity'
or a hundred fastballs fired at once
and freezing the sky over the city.

And that's why drunks leaning up
against abandoned buildings, women
hurrying home on deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners, and
even thieves stepping from alleys
all stare up at once. Why else do
sleepwalkers move toward the windows,
or old men drag fllimsy lawn chairs
onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals
press sad foreheads to steel bars?
Because the night is alive with lamps!
That's why in dark houses all over the city
dreams stir in the pillows, a million
plumes of breath rise into the sky.

At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire
of stars flaming on the other side of the sky,
but the body stares into an empty night sheen,
a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels,
feverish old loves: don't seperate yet.
Let what rises live with what descends.

FROM -Wild Gratitude
Knopf,New York, 1986....


Had too much too think earlier, so now I rest in Wood Green,  at sisters ,still looking out, tomorrow  will have a look  at river.. sweet dreams... back soon.

March for the Alternative ( Saturday March 26th ) Why I'm marching.

This coming Saturday I will join thousands of protestors marching to protest against David Cameron's Tory led coalitions plans to divide Britain. Millions of workers, pensioners, students and benefit claimants are currently being kicked in the teeth by this government. A coaltion need I not remind you that the majority of the people of this country did not vote for.
Driven by right wing ideolgy hellbent on destruction, Margeret Thatcher herself did not dare to do to the N.H.S what Cameron and his cronies is about to try and do. He and his partner in crime Nick Clegg has unleashed a wreacking ball to the ethos of the welfare state and must be resisted. They seem intent on rolling back the years with mass privatisation and sweeping cuts that are based simply on ideological reasons, one based on capitalism and greed. The money supply which capitalism breathes with and the conservatives allies the bankers are sucking the life out of society while ordinary people suffer.
These are some of my reasons for joining the protestsors on the T.U.C March for the Alternative this Saturday.
The dismanting of years of progress by the wreckless antics of a priveleged few must be oppossed. The cuts about to be implemented will effect the lives of every person in the land, apart from a small elite. Ordinary citizens will be hit the hardest while the Tory's friends the bankers, who incidentally caused our current financial crises get away scot free.
Nick Clegg himself said last May that Ministers "would put fairness at the heart of everthing we do". He was obviously telling lies, because it would be hard person to find any fairness in any of the policies this coalition has pursued.
I would urge everyone who can, to try and join the demo on Saturday, we have nothing to lose and so much to gain, we must show this government that the people are united against them, we have the power to challeng them and ghange their direction.We must at every opportunity say no to their lies, their distortion of reality.
They want to crush us, and divide us, but we have the power to beat them, remember in recent times history has proven that their is no greater force than the will and the power of the people.
The Con-dem reality is a simple class driven policy of stealing from the poor and giving it back to the rich.Their vicious onslaught will continue unabated , with their dangerous policies impacting on us well into the future. It is time to fight back, time to march, time to tell them with one voice.No. For tomorrow's sake and for justice's sake.

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.

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.