In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • BALLAD OF REFUGE by David Punter

    I come in fear. The wheels, the stuttering engine,

    By road or wave; the endless killing payments.

    Bit by bit, my mind returns to rubble.

     

    You come in fear. The hunched back, failed bravado,

    They make me squirm. You have no place here, brother;

    Get back, for you remind me of my weakness.

     

    I starve, I thirst. I’m out there in my millions,

    Teeming, weeping. Just allow me, brother,

    One foot on land. I’ll work hard for my pittance.

     

    You starve, you thirst. What of me, of my neighbours,

    Struggling in an austere land? The steel-plant’s silent,

    My skills no longer fit, my hands are idle.

     

    My hopes are gone. My suffering gods won’t travel,

    My women cannot see, their eyes are blinded

    By the long dust, the silent days of torture.

     

    My hopes are gone. You come and you displace me,

    The silent mills and fields, they scorn and mock me,

    The Union Jack’s a shroud; all’s ripe for burning.

     

    I call to you. Across the long dark waters,

    Carrying a load of trinkets not worth selling,

    Umbrellas, handbags, at the gang-master’s calling.

     

    You call to me. I stop my ears with plaster,

    My sons and daughters can’t afford their schooling,

    My hospitals are full, the asylum’s broken.

     

    My last cry sinks. Protect me from this hardness,

    This cold that shrinks my soul. Pity me, brother,

    Or think on me adrift on the long night’s calling.

     

    My last cry sinks. Protect me from this falling.

    The bailiffs come, the sheets won’t disentangle.

    My homeland’s gone. God help us all this winter.

     

                                                                                     David Punter, 2016.

     

    Copyright © David Punter. Reproduced here by kind permission.

     

    Explanation

    This poem featured on the website of the UK Poetry Society in 2016. David Punter (born 1949) is Professor of English at Bristol University. Two opposing states of human desperation are described in the poem, seemingly irreconcilable. Mutual hatred becomes an obvious product, ruinous to both, but there to be exploited by the unscrupulous and the self-seeking, creatures of chaos and destruction.

    Here is a link to a version of the poem formatted as a little poster : Ballad of Refuge, D Punter.

    You can download the poster and print it out.

    I believe this poem belongs with Robert Friends’s “Hatred : a Sestina.” They provide between them a compassionate but clear-sighted view of present predicaments.

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  • HATRED : A SESTINA by Robert Friend

    Hatred

    is wanting

    to hurt

    and its fulfillment

    dancing

    on someone’s grave.

     

    Because the insult was grave,

    I must repay hatred with hatred,

    abandon all pleasure: the dancing,

    the flirting, the wallowing wantings

    of every day. How drab their fulfillment

    when compared with the pleasure to hurt.

     

    I plan to avenge the hurt

    if it takes all my life to the grave.

    Revenge is the deepest fulfillment.

    I shall give myself to my hatred.

    No means too mean shall be wanting

    when the consummation is dancing.

     

    I dream day and night of that dancing.

    His death will not save him from hurt.

    There’s more than a grave he’ll be wanting

    when I get to dance on his grave,

    whirling in an orgy of hatred,

    stamping on his slab in fulfillment.

     

    But if I am to enjoy that fulfillment

    my thoughts must be spinning and dancing

    endlessly.  What of my hatred’s

    last rites: What shoes shall I wear to hurt

    in?  What tune shall I dance to?  Grave

    decisions. And how shall I get there? Wanting

     

    answers to all these. What a desolation of wanting

    that murders all other fulfillment.

    I might as well be in my grave.

    For under that frenzy of dancing

    whose body’s writhing?  Whose heart’s mortally hurt?

    I am the corpse of my hatred.

     

    Dare I dig a grave for that hatred,

    abandon abandonment there, the terrible wanting to hurt?

    That thought itself is fulfillment. My heart, my heart begins dancing.

     

     

    Copyright © Jean Shapiro Cantu. Reproduced here by kind permission.

     

    Explanation

    Robert Friend (1913 – 1998 ) was an American poet and translator. I am grateful to Jean Cantu, his niece and copyright holder, for agreeing to his poem being published here at the same time as David Punter’s poem “Ballad of Refuge.” This last was featured on the website of the UK Poetry Society last year (see next post). David Punter is an English poet and teacher.

    It seemed to me that the two poems address some urgent and connected issues of the present times and do so with equal authority and in a similar way. In each case, the poet reaches into a state of human being which is not necessarily his own, yet is in the inheritance of us all, in order to understand better, throw light upon, the world as it is happening. There is something courageously redemptive about both poems. Don’t blink. Only connect…

    Is it possible for hatred to lie quietly in a grave ? Dare we ?

    Here is a link to a version of the poem formatted as a little poster :  Hatred by Robert Friend

    You can download the poster and print it out.

     

     

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  • I Insist my Ribs Contain Stars

    I Insist my Ribs

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  • Despatches to my Gazan Son

    Boy_and_soldier_in_front_of_Israeli_wall

    Justin C McIntosh has given his permission for his photograph above to be used for the cover of a long Turkish poem by Cahit Koytak, now published as a book with an English translation alongside. I am proud to have been one of the translators.

    The original Turkish poem is called Gazze Risalesi.  In English we have made that title Despatches to my Gazan Son – which is not a literal translation as such, but which feels true to, and respectful of, the spirit and address of the poem. We are all content with it.

    The book’s publishers are the Yunus Emre Institute, which is the Turkish equivalent of the British Council. My Turkish friend Mevlut Ceylan translated the original poem into English and then handed his text over to me, so that I could turn it into mother-tongue English. Cahit Koytak’s own family also helped me.

    I felt hugely privileged to have been given this task. Cahit Koytak is a distinguished poet in Turkey and I believe that this long poem of his is a great and international one. And I am proud of the result of my work, and the printed book itself is of good quality, more cloth-bound than paperback, carefully and tastefully done.

    Despatches to my Gazan Son is an extended lament on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza. Cahit Koytak addresses himself to Yusuf, a fictional Palestinian boy. Then he turns to Joseph, a fictional Israeli young man. He grieves and condemns and beseeches, sounding like the father of both of them, sounding also rather like an Old Testament prophet, with his voice of passionate, timeless authority.

    The book came out just before Christmas 2016. I am still unclear what plans there are for its launch, promotion and distribution. These are unsettled times. I yearn for the chance to read it with Cahit – or at least excerpts from it. In the meantime, here is his voice reading the Turkish original, along with pictures of the children of Gaza.  And here am I reading the English version, my voice accompanied by those same pictures.

    Gazze Risalesi has also been translated into Arabic and I understand that this version too is available from the Yunus Emre Institute.

    I wrote the above paragraphs in February 2017. I am writing these last four over a year later. It is Monday July 2nd 2018, another hot day in a long string of hot days here in the UK. To date, there has still been no launch in this country of this fine poem by Cahit Koytak, published as a Turkish-English bilingual book. I have received no answers to queries I have sent to various quarters. The times are presumably even more unsettled this year than they were last.

    I still have a handful of copies of “Despatches to my Gazan Son” here in my work-room, unread. It has the same picture on its cover as the one at the head of this post. It looks good. Elsewhere on the home page of the site, is a link to two youtube recordings mentioned earlier. Each shares the same succession of pictures of children in Gaza. One recording has Cahit Koytak reciting the first part of his poem in Turkish ; the other has me reciting the English version.

    In addition, here now is the full text of the English version. I am not the sole copyright holder of this English text, but have not conferred with Mevlut Ceylan on my decision to do what I can to make it generally available. I take full responsibility for the unilateral decision I am making here.

    In July 2015, the international magazine “Electronic Intafada” published some brief excerpts from the English translation of the poem. Here is the link to those excerpts.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Shavings from The Rainbow

     

    What is God, after all ?

    If maggots in a dead dog

    be but God kissing carrion,

    what then is not God ?

     

    And when the war began

    it seemed that the poles

    of the universe were cracking

    and the whole

    must go tumbling

    into the bottomless pit.

     

    You feel an agony of helplessness.

    You can do nothing.

    Vaguely you know

    the huge powers of the world

    are rolling and crashing together,

    darkly, clumsily, stupidly,

    yet colossal,

    so that you’re brushed along,

    almost as dust,

    helpless,

    swirling like dust !

     

    Can you

    with your own hands

    fight the vast forces of the earth

    as they crash and roll,

    can you hold the hills in their places ?

    You want to fight

    with your own warm hands

    against the whole.

    For what is not

    God, after all ?

     

    Rogan Wolf, February 2017

     

    The vast majority of the words of this poem were first written in prose by DH Lawrence. They occur in three separate passages towards the end of Chapter XII of Lawrence’s great novel “The Rainbow.” The war he was referring to was the Boer War. In turn, Lawrence’s reference in the first few lines here to “maggots in a dead dog” comes from “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene 2.

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  • The Angel Overhead

     

    In his grief, he asked the angel hanging overhead,

    his faceless confessor  :

    Why, Lord, do sinners’ ways so grossly prosper ?

    How can you allow the Lie so fatly to preside ?

    And the angel answered :

    I invited you to my feast,

    my laden tables, my radiant halls,

    and for my reward,

    through each fraught breath of human history,

    you’ve tortured me with nails.

    Rogan Wolf, February 2017

     

    The question “Why do sinners’ ways prosper ?” was taken from “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend,”  a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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  • Snowdrops

    Snowdrops copy

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  • Earth Words

    Earth Words copy

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