In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • Poems for United Response (2)

    United Response is a UK registered charity which supports people who have disabilities. It aims to help them fulfill themselves in the community. It seeks to ensure they receive their basic human rights.

    It is one of many good organisations seeking to maintain and strengthen our society’s bindings, in times and under leaders seemingly intent on weakening them. I came across it after crossing a bridge. A few more details are available in my first post of this same title.

    I’m contributing poems to the organisation’s monthly Postcards from the Edges online bulletin and also, more recently, to its bulletin for staff.

    Here below are the latest, one for each bulletin.

    The first is by me, attempting to do justice to, and find words for, the experience of my late sister Kim, who had Down’s Syndrome.

    The second is by a Consultant Oncologist called Dr Sam Guglani. It describes an encounter between doctor and patient and I find it utterly beautiful. The original was written in prose and in “translating” it into a poem that fits into a poster, I have had to cut it a bit. I think it should accompany the Hippocratic Oath as a basic text for medical training.

    Here are the poems below. If you click on the titles, you will be re-directed to pdf versions, which can be printed out.

     

    Going for a Walk

     

    When I go for a walk
    people look round at me.

    Will you come too ?
    Will you hold my hand ?

    They look round at me.
    There’s something wrong.

    Will you come too ?

    Perhaps I’ll put my ear-phones in
    and play my music extra loud.

    I am going for a walk.
    What’s wrong ?

    Will you come too ?
    Will you hold my hand ?

    Rogan Wolf
    October 2013

     

    Kim was my sister. She had Down’s Syndrome. We often went out together. Some of the words above are hers, some mine.

     

    from Fingerprints

     

    Look at how we start, like fortune-tellers,
    at the hands. Here by the window,
    where ward meets world, I examine

    this man’s, turn them over like found leaves….
    A tree surgeon’s hands, he says, my skin
    pressed in to other life, its bark and blood,

    just like you doc I bet, your fingerprints
    handed to others… I think our bodies
    are this, that we merge really, collide

    and become the breath of others. Here,
    he says, go on, have a whiff. My fingers
    drum his chest. Did you hear those sounds,

    he asks, from that comet, like whale song,
    mermaids? The ship they landed,
    its name, what, Philae? – it means end,

    or place’s edge, some frontier where
    things meet… I shine a light in his ears. Hard
    now to tell which of us is speaking, where

    the voice comes from. One of us says thank you.
    I go to wash my hands but, seeing them
    in the water, stop, turn, return to him.

    Sam Guglani

     

    Dr Sam Guglani is an oncologist, and founder of “Medicine Unboxed.”                 Poem reproduced here by kind permission.

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  • Despatches to my Gazan Son

    At the end of last year I translated into English a long poem by the distinguished Turkish poet Cahit Koytak. In Turkish, the poem is called “Gazze Risalesi.” It was written in 2008, but could just as easily have been composed last Summer, during the Israeli bombings which took place then, too. It seems that not much has changed in Gaza over the last seven years.

    The poem consists of an extended lament and protest and meditation, in almost biblical terms and tones, on the fate of the Palestinian children in Gaza, in the shadow of the Israeli wall. First the poet addresses a young Palestinian called Yusuf, then a young Israeli called Joseph.

    I have no doubt that the poem should be read in many other languages besides Turkish. For the apparently unending and irreconcilable stand-off between the Palestinians and Israelis, is not just a distant local affair, between “foreigners”. This conflict near Galilee takes place on a continental and historical fault-line that runs through the flesh and awareness of every European, since Europe’s connection with Jewishness is an ancient and barely redeemable entanglement, as is the connection between the three great faiths which share the Old Testament as holy book and claim the same hot patch of the Earth’s crust as holy land. And that entanglement continues unresolved, creating new victims, new scapegoats, new nightmares, new sin and new shame, every day.

    The poem is soon to be published in book form by the Yunus Emre Institute, the Turkish equivalent of the British Council (the Institute is named after the Sufi poet Yunus Emre, who lived in the thirteenth century).

    The Yunus Emre publication will not just contain the Turkish original. There will be an English translation and maybe even an Arabic one, as well.

    I wrote the English translation, working partly from a literal English translation by Mevlut Ceylan, a Turk himself who has lived in London for many years. Doing it has introduced me to the poem’s author, Cahit Koytak, whom I had grown to love even before I met him in June of this year. With his assent, I have entitled the English translation “Despatches to my Gazan Son,” a slightly different meaning from the original.

    For the Turkish word “Risalesi” is difficult to translate adequately into English. It apparently implies “Chapbook” or “Notes”or “Jottings” – something produced in pencil or by degrees or in episodes – not a formal whole.  “Despatches” has some of that feeling, though with obvious military connotations. But the poem is full of almost familial love and grief and outrage, as well. Hence “…to my Gazan Son.”

    You can read my English version of the poem here.

    But it is becoming available in other forms and media, besides hand-held book and text online.

    For instance, it is already on YouTube, now in two different languages – Turkish and English.

    The Turkish is a recording of Cahit Koytak’s own voice, with his Turkish words appearing onscreen at the same time as his voice speaks them.

    And the English is a recording of my voice, accompanied by my English translation in the same way. My son Nik did the recording.

    Both films offer the same succession of photographs of Palestinian children in Gaza, those pictures downloaded from the internet by two of Cahit Koytak’s sons.

    Also, an online journal of good quality called “Electronic Intafada” has published some short excerpts from the English version, at the same time providing links to both the You-tube films. The magazine’s editors chose the excerpts. I think they’ve chosen well.

     

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  • Poems for United Response

    United Response is a registered charity which supports people who have disabilities. It aims to help them fulfill themselves and be less isolated in our community. It seeks to ensure they receive their basic human rights.

    In mentioning this particular organisation here, I am not seeking to advertise it at the possible expense of others in the same field, all of them forced to compete with one another by the policies of successive UK governments in thrall to a fundamentalist belief that the market and market principles belong in all activities, all parts of our Society. United Response is just one of many good organisations seeking to strengthen the bindings of our community. It is my view that competition in this field is a waste of good energy and irrelevant to excellence. All of such organisations need to flourish.

    I just happen to have come upon this one, after crossing a bridge one day. It is responsible for various highly imaginative ideas including an online periodical called Easy News and another called Postcards from the Edges. It campaigns for Every Vote Counts, an initiative designed to make politics accessible to all, particularly people with learning disabilities, most of whom are entitled to vote.

    Getting to know United Response, I have found that there is often and already a fair amount of poetry in its veins, but it pleases me to think that I might be able to add some more.

    So I’m contributing poems to its monthly Postcards from the Edges online bulletin and also, more recently, to its bulletin for staff.

    Here below are the latest, one for each bulletin.

    The first is by one of the people supported by United Response. I saw Luke’s piece at an exhibition of the some of the postcards.

    The second comes from a series of poems I wrote some years ago, called “I Hyphen Thou.” The series borrows the hyphen idea from a book by Martin Buber called “I and Thou.” The hyphen connects people. It is precarious but also precious ground. We need to defend and look after it. Without it we are nothing.

    Clicking on the titles will link you to the pdf versions, which can be downloaded.

     

    Stig’s Helmet

    My favourite TV
    programme is Top Gear.
    The Stig has a talent
    but hides behind his helmet.
    I have lots of talents
    but do not hide
    behind my autism.

    Luke

    from Hyphen Loitering (with intent)

    …I believe today I almost met someone.
    For just a few moments, possibly,
    the whirring edge of me
    disturbed some surface of attention.

    Perhaps in time I’ll risk being still enough
    actually to meet a whole person.
    I wonder would either of us survive
    the awe and enormity of true encounter.

    I loiter here between lines of thunder
    poised for that sudden break
    that momentary opening
    my own hushed moment of interruption….

    Rogan Wolf

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  • Message to Andy

    After the May election, I joined the Labour Party. Since then I have been inundated by messages from an extraordinary number of Labour representatives, each passionately keen to get virtually personal with me. These include each of the present Party Leader candidates, as well as candidates for the Deputy Leader, all of whom, of course, are hoping for the votes of as many Party members as possible. In theory I can’t  fault all this. And on the face of it, email allows for more direct “contact” between politician and electorate. But is it really “contact” ? Or just a newish kind of computer game ?

    Andy Burnham wrote to me yesterday. At least, the message is worded as if it were him. But it wasn’t. It was just his name. And he wasn’t writing to me. In reality he’s never even heard of me.

    What follows below is a version of my virtual reply to Andy Burnham’s virtual approach, a reply which he will never read.

    I know that in replying to this message, I cannot be addressing the candidate himself, even though his name runs along the top of it, even though the original message to me below, using my first name, purports to come from him, as to a friend. Hi Rogan. Hi Andy.

    That matiness from cyberspace is where I have to start. In earth-bound reality, I do more or less warm to Andy Burnham and think that, probably and all things considered, he is the most substantive candidate available for the role of Labour leader. Whether that means he is capable of driving the Tories and what they stand for out of the driving seat and engine room and language and spirit of this nation, is another matter altogether.

    The signs are not hopeful. [Actually, I voted for Corbyn in the end and am glad I did so. The pot needed stirring to its depths and Blairism of whatever colour is not “modernisation,” whatever claims it makes. For all its longevity, New Labour was a failed experiment, a harsh lesson to learn from. It led directly to the fanged and fated hoody-huggers we have now, spoilt rude-boys cavorting in a flattened landscape].

    One sign is these messages which we keep receiving from Andy Burnham and the other candidates. The Tories’ victory in May was a terrible result for the whole nation. Afterwards, like so many other people, I wanted instinctively to get in closer to an alternative position, to feel less overwhelmed and helpless among all the shame and poison of Cameron’s victory, which has made community, honour, youth, hope and a worthy future for this country so much harder to achieve and even envisage. So I became a Labour member.

    But a Labour member on my own terms and on my own ground, please, so that I can make whatever contribution I can, or which feels right, in my own way. Isn’t that a fairly normal approach to doing something new ? Eyes wide, feet tentative. But instead, I have been met by a whole blizzard of emails which have really been quite seriously off-putting. Eyes sorely tempted to close, feet to turn around. Yes, true, I know I can click to say I don’t want any more approaches from the candidates. And at the bottom of his message today, Ben Nolan, the Party’s Head of Membership, shows us how we can choose which and how many of the Labour party messages we want to receive. Just click here or there. Click click click. And yes, the intentions behind all this are of course not malign or for money. But it’s technically so clumsy, and the language so riddled with ad-speak.

    For it’s not just the number, the flooding, the superfluity of them, that disappoints and puts off. It’s their lack of quality, as if all their language and even their sincerity are somehow second-hand and uncomfortable, however well-meant.

    Just more second-rate selling technique. Just more sloganising. That put-on intimate tone which isn’t intimate at all but a cheap replica of intimacy. That use of my first name as if to a friend, very common now of course, borrowed from the commercial sector, as a way of selling, like playing sweet music in the supermarket. Just more spin.

    So I am writing back to my mate “Andy”, knowing of course that, at best, the person reading my words will be some nameless enthusiast who may himself never have met “Andy.” And “Andy” has asked me to click on some button or other, so that “Andy” can decide which stream of “personalised” advert/propaganda material, addressed as if to his close mate, will suit my category.

    Is this the Labour Party “riding the crest of the times” ? The best we can do ? But it’s not riding anything. It’s just being pulled along by cheap novelty, making what’s bad only worse. It’s an incoherent and unconsidered climbing aboard a train already off the rails. Politics in general and the Labour party in particular have lost contact with their constituency, to everyone’s enormous cost. Democracy itself is reeling and losing its way. We have to get trust back and for that to happen we need to re-create and re-discover how to communicate properly again. Clumsy internet firestorms, borrowed from junk-mail techniques, have nothing to do with real communication and merely add to our alienation. This is not the way to restore Labour’s fortunes.

    Which conclusion leads to some further thoughts – and it is here that I start getting confused and hesitant myself. But let’s carry on. This is maybe where we all have to go.

    In “his” message below, Andy Burnham says that : “two themes really stood out in what I read: that we need to reconnect with voters all over the country, and that we need to do so by being true to Labour values, not simply copying the Tories.”

    Well, I have already suggested that sending out firestorms of second rate junk-mail is a poor start at reconnecting with voters all over the country.

    But I also want to challenge And Burnham on the second theme he mentions. I agree absolutely that “copying the Tories” or – put another way – winning back the Blairite “middle ground”, or – put another way – getting “real” and being willing to leave our high-minded “comfort zones”, or – put another way – supporting “aspiration” and “hard-working families,” is not how to restore our community or the nation’s health or the Labour Party’s proper place in our society. The Labour Party has got to re-discover its own heart and soul and then – with its heart and soul, and some talent – fight for them. In fighting for them, it will be fighting for the nation’s heart and soul, as well.

    But I do not agree that “Labour values” is a sufficient starting-point. For one thing, it’s not clear exactly what these values are. For a second thing, the statement suggests a going back. And we can’t go back.

    To find answers to our present predicament and consternation, we can’t go back into the past, to a particular beginning of a particular short-lived shape. Instead, we have to go to first principles. Back to the very beginning, in fact. And that’s not “back” at all. For by definition, first principles apply to all times, not just to one. They exist at the still point of the turning world, even ours that is spinning so frantically.

    The Labour Party emerged at a certain time in British history, closely connected to the Trade Union movement and the Co-operative movement. As the middle class became impossible to hold down and repress in the nineteenth century, and won the vote and then tended to be represented in Parliament by the Whigs, later re-named the Liberals, so the working class achieved representation several decades later, through the Labour Party. The party thus took shape and momentum from a particular context. Going back to its values, much defined in response to nineteenth century industrial conditions, will not lead to anywhere vital to us now, however interesting and perhaps instructive.

    For it is absolutely clear to me that all political parties in the UK reached their sell-by date long ago and have become just play-backs and echoes of the past, united by terms of reference, and fired by goals and loyalties, that are all now so behindhand that they no longer apply or truly satisfy in many ways. Amid such frantic changes as we are experiencing in this generation, how could it be otherwise ?

    The questions of first principle that have to be asked must surely include these : what do we believe the individual is for ? What is the meaning and purpose of an individual human life ? What relationship with the community do we see the individual as having ? What do we believe the community is for ?

    And from these position statements, if we can find them, we shall inevitably proceed to discussions on how strong and large we want the state to be, how to make tax-collection work better, how better to implement regulation so that people are more prone to value and co-operate with it, how to restore our trust in language, how to make communication more commonly a sharing of truth.

    And are not such questions almost as much philosophical, or even religious, as they are political ? Maybe it has always been the case that these different spheres of thought and operation actually belong quite closely together, and feed each other. But I have the feeling that they need to do so more now, perhaps, than ever before.

    And I have the feeling too, along with more and more other people, that “Left” and “Right” are these days insufficient descriptions of different places on the political spectrum. That “spectrum” itself may not belong anymore.  Ultimately, I do not look to the Labour Party somehow to put itself back together again. Or the Liberal Democrats to recover. Or the Greens to grow. I look instead to all these elements to combine. There needs to be a divesting of all the old shapes and encampments. There has to be a new gathering of forces altogether, and a new vision and set of ideas, uniting and speaking for people who reject the raw materialism and the individualistic self-interest and the social irresponsibility and worship of the Lie, this gangland grouping led by sleek rude-boys recently given yet more power to rend and smash and reduce. If the dynamic gathering of the forces of renewal we need is what people mean by “the Progressive Left,” then so be it.

    But I actually do not see this new platform as being “left” at all. I see it as being merely a coming together of the sane, the loving, the adult and the clear-seeing. For I believe that there is a significant extent to which the people presently in control have resorted to and called out the meanest levels of human nature in reaction to our present precarious common reality, a reaction that is actually pathological and unsound. Our nation’s future should be in better and wiser and kinder hands than these.

    Sincere best wishes

    Rogan Wolf

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  • David Attenborough, Barak Obama, a starling and a blackbird

    David Attenborough has given a long life to his love and defence of the natural world, whose destruction has continued despite him, at our hands. The other day he had a chat with an American president of stature and they agreed on quite a few things. At first a starling took part in their conversation. Then there came a blackbird. See below.

     

    Birdsong Today

    “Sir : I’m 14 and have just started my GCSEs…I want the chance to be something, to make a difference….[but] whilst we grow up our planet is being destroyed…On Monday you reported James Lovelock’s announcement that it was already too late. ‘We are past the point of no return’ he said…”

    Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, Letters, The Independent, Thursday 19th January 2006.

     

    Birdsong today
    from the roof ridge opposite
    around eleven
    lasting about three minutes.
    I think it was a starling.

    Then again towards dusk
    (a time of clamour when I was young)
    I heard a still small voice
    in the great plane tree
    down the road

    and saw it –
    a tiny
    misty shape
    high in the branches
    scolding me with its song.

    It lasted a minute or two
    before darkness fell.

    Rogan Wolf
    January 2006

     

    The Last Blackbird

    That blackbird pouring its heart out
    through the last hour of the day
    may be the last in Creation.

    It sings quite well, considering
    the force of the world’s grief, guilt, terror,
    the forest of microphones sprouting round its feet

    the incessant flashes and shrieks.
    As the evening news re-plays
    the blackbird’s voice, the voice

    of the newscaster breaks.

      Rogan Wolf 
    June 2009

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  • But What is Number One ?

    “…And Number One, deep in its steel case
    lashing at forests, at continents, at cities,
    befouling ocean, air-wave, blood-stream,

    raising hordes
    of zealots to slaughter their fellows
    in the name of a phantasm,

    breeding the will to deceive,
    tending the urge to piracy and plunder,
    nurturing despair, aiding inertia,

    working deep in, working slowly
    to the very core, paring,
    particularising, severing, numbering,

    Number One turns from its vast enterprise
    hissing in glee
    at my distress

    and whispers :
    “From whence do you consider
    stem my victories ?…”

    Rogan Wolf, Spring 1994

    (The above is an excerpt from a much longer poem written during a sort of Sabbatical I took, having just gone free-lance after years as manager of a mental health community centre. The poem is one of a series about the “Shadow” half of the human self.)

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  • The Shaming of Tiddalik

    The election lost, we wander round the ruins and embers, still shell-shocked. And with Labour’s Miliband having resigned so swiftly, the contest for his successor gives no cause whatsoever for comfort or for hope. Who are these people jostling now to replace him ? What brought them to this position ? Has anyone yet had time really to think things through, to talk hard and deep and widely, to emerge with any real integrity or justification ?

    I want to give due credit to Jon Cruddas, the Labour thinker of note whose thought was not much listened to by the Miliband circle.  Yet he is still there, still thinking, still arguing. He admired the Bishops’ letter of a few months ago. He responded creatively. It is worth paying real attention to both them and him.

    And Cruddas is surely right in saying how serious and significant Labour’s election defeat has been (see: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/16/labour-great-crisis-ever) To say Labour lost merely because it moved away from Blairite compromises with the “Haves” and with what is falsely and cravenly termed as our  “aspiration” to emulate excess, is insufficient and self-serving on the part of the proponents of this line ; further  – as Seamus Milne persuasively argues in Wednesday’s Guardian – it is merely surrendering to propaganda from our plutocrat creature press rather than being true to conviction and also to the British public at large, a majority of whom favoured Miliband’s careful cluster of slightly egalitarian proposals. See: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/20/blairite-revival-leadership-contest-labour-breakup

    For the nation’s sake, we must think and talk in much larger and more fundamental terms than this sorry Labour shuffle backwards and rightwards to where anti-social hooligans operate. What is in question is whether or not there can be such a thing as truth, honesty, fairness and community in our modern way of living.

    John Harris’s analysis of the problem is also searching, and equally dismissive of a Blairite re-run. See http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/15/labour-history-leadership If Labour is to take power again it needs to become a real social movement, as it used but long ago ceased to be. Long ago, under Blair and maybe before that, it became just another distrusted party making false promises from Westminster. But how to become a movement now, and in what form ? And Cruddas (with the Bishops) is asking questions even more searching than that. He is trying to re-think what makes community now, what makes a civilised society now, how can we rise to this flood of change we have released and are living – how can we make something recognisably human out of it ?

    For it is not just Labour which lost the election on May 7th 2015. This nation did. Our children did. All our futures did.

    And the balance of forces which 37% of us elected back into power rests on a set of hollow and discredited mantras that belong in the nineteenth century rather than in the twenty first, surrounded and defended by a ring of wagons made up of a corrupt press and of individuals in possession of outrageous and anti-social wealth, desperate to retain it at whatever the universal cost.  These forces are not the answer to our nation’s needs. They are merely the creatures of our vacuum, spawned by it. They belong nowhere else but in our dangerous vacuum.

    We have to go back to first principles. Labour is now in a good position to do so, on behalf of the rest of the nation, if it is willing to face the reality of our malaise, if it is willing truly to serve this nation’s needs.

    One theme I keep pushing is language itself. How can we learn/re-learn to speak cleanly to one another in ways that support community and trust and democracy ? Politicians seem no longer to know how to, or even to see why they should, our re-elected Prime Minister least of all. Juvenile lies and slogans, delivered as if from clockwork toys. Neither does most of the press use language actually to speak to fellow human beings. Press and politicians, both, are barely bothering with real language as they drag each other further and further down. Essentially they just snarl and howl, or else purr winningly, using a camouflage of words to do so. That alone cripples our democracy and any hope of renewal.

    I propose a law that restores the ancient punishment of the stocks. That punishment should be reserved for politicians (and journalists and others who are given the authority of a public platform) who use language deceitfully (a loose definition, I grant you). The stocks should be set up at the centre of Parliament Square. Any politician who is caught being deceitful should be sentenced immediately by the Speaker, the more senior the politician the more severe the penalty. Prime Ministerial deceit would warrant a week in the stocks, followed by five years of full-time Community Service, as penance. It might make him socially useful at last. It might teach him why it is important to tell the truth.

    For the Lie was another winner at this last election, as well as Fear, as well as Greed and Envy, and there is a sense in which all of us assented to that victory.

    I do not see any hope or future in this rump of a devastated Labour party, now seeking to rehash failed and exhausted Blairite collusions with the Lie. The only solution I can see, the only hope, is for there now to be a profound rethinking and reworking of what it means to be progressive, what it means to put value on community and on responsibility to others, what it means not to lie to self or others. That thinking must involve all parties of the “left” as presently constituted and understood. And it must destroy all those parties of the “left” as presently constituted and understood. And it must lead to an entirely new entity and alliance shaped from the essence of all of them, a new party and grouping large and sure enough to roll the Tories back into the humble shape to which they truly belong, like Tiddalik the frog who was made at last to laugh, so that others might drink from stream and pool, and so he shrank back into his true froggy and insignificant size, and crept away into the reeds and hid his face in shame.

    (For the legend of Tiddalik the frog see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiddalik )

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  • Dying Aside

    She’s 95
    and in a side room

    with tubes up her nostrils
    and eyes without iris.

    Death can be pain-free these days –
    shrieking no longer on the menu.

    Only she pants
    like a woman in labour

    snatching at the air
    as the waves consume her.

    The door
    stands open.

    She hears the nurses chat
    and their hot feet patter

    up and down the corridor.
    Higher and higher the waves.

    Alone, aside,
    she’s a gasping cadaver

    a few sucked breaths
    from completion.

    Rogan Wolf
    Autumn 2009

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