Poem: The Secondhand Book

I am a book, remaindered on a shelf.

  O take me down and dust me off,

    I still can bring delight.

Once I was new and valued for myself,

  My pages bright, my boards of cloth –

    Ah then I brought delight.

Now on the lower shelves the readers browse,

  While I look down and mutely sigh

    I still can bring delight.

There once I welcomed readers to carouse

  With me enthralled and hold me tight,

    For then I brought delight.

I can’t believe it’s over and I must

  Resign myself to indifference

    While still I hold delight?

Tho faded my jacket and on my top sits dust

  If opened up my heart holds sense

    And still can bring delight.

Reflections on poetry hunting to compile a program of Savile poets. March 2019.

Poem: Clouds

I wish I could cherish 
The uncertainty. I wish 
I could float above 
The void like a cloud,

Happily ignorant 

Of the precipices

And chasms, and of 

The beautiful river plains 

As well – just drifting, 

Fulfilling the role 

Assigned to me 

By circumstance.

Looking ahead 

I would know that whatever 

I did was going to 

Turn out OK; not 

Because I knew 

What was coming,

But because I didn’t. 

Looking behind 

I could see no trace

Of where I’d been,

Or what I’d done.

But that wouldn’t matter 

Because I rained 

Or shaded 

Or evaporated

On cue. 

I had a shape on earth

But left no mark. 

I belonged but 

Never over-stayed. 

I made life possible 

For others without 

Colouring their minds. 

I removed myself 

For their celebrations;

Yet enfolded their doubts

With gloomy darkness. 

I had no need of companions

But never traveled alone. 

I was but was not. 

I became without form. 

I made no move but

encircled the earth. 

I was always 

The obedient servant

Of the sun.

5/2/19

Poem: The Big Bang

A long time ago a meteor struck the earth:
    Life is its echo.
A long time ago the paradox of life struck me:
    I am the echo.

Researchers are just beginning to find out about the one –
    I am just beginning to find out about the other.

Both were given shape by forces beyond their conception;
    Forces noone can unwind.

No dream can be undreamt:
    It can only be lived..

What all these things have in common is that we only discover
    Long after the event
    What they really meant.

Written in the night 0530. 5/2/19

Poem: The Trouble with Politics

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The problem isn’t politicians, it’s us.

We don’t want to think about things:

We expect to be handed answers on a plate.

We want our whims to be catered for

Without cost. We resent taxes

Yet expect schools and hospitals

To spring up where we need them.

We moan at the state of the world,

Dismiss politicians as useless;

And expect things to get better

Without anyone rolling up their shirt sleeves

Or putting their shoulders to the wheel.

We look to politicians to give us a lead,

Yet we crush the poetry out their souls

And still expect them to sing in our key.

When something frivolous crosses our minds

We expect them to implement it without delay –

The big things we ignore, they’re too hard.

Migration? We’re against it.

Where should the desperate go?

– Answer came there none.

Is child poverty bad? Yes obviously ...

Unless tackling it involves higher taxes.

Is ‘small government’ good? Of course ...

Unless you want new motorways.

The arts? Can’t afford them. Yet casually

We wave through billions on nuclear arms –

which would destroy us if we used them.

Europe? Don’t even go there.

There is no solution to anything

Unless it involves We The People -

Not We The Businesses, not We 

The Tax-avoiding Trans-national,

Not We The Wealthy-who-don’t-use-public-services.

We The People demand that YOU

engage with US. Don’t expect us

To do anything.  It’s not our job.

It doesn’t make a great poetry does it –

Life so raw and lumpy?

        Where nowadays are noble thoughts,

    words that rhyme with climate change?

                       Or sentences that rearrange

              A world disordered, out of sorts?

 They’ve all been used and done no good.

              The simple truths we understood

     Now owned by cynics, whose one aim   

                        Is to make us all the same:

                  Mindless consumers, unaware

        That what we’ve lost is how to share

   The traits which confer on us humanity:

              Compassion, joy and equanimity. 

The abdication of responsibility

The problem is that we cannot abdicate the political sphere to the cynics who say that decency and fairness are no longer possible, for that is what the power-hungry monsters want. (Look at Hungary or Israel.) They seek to corrupt normal society in order to declare that traditional rules no longer apply and grab power while the bourgeois are disorientated. 

That’s the Trump/Bannon playbook, and like the Nazis they tap into a deep memory within the indigenous population of ‘good times’ before whatever current instability has threatened their social values - using im/explicit racism to “explain” hugely complex geo-financial issues (which no one can easily summarise) to create a narrative that ordinary people can lock onto in their uncertainties and parrot as fact. 

I haven’t been to Paris for 15 years maybe, but I was shocked then by the way that parts of it no longer appear to a European city. And I’m sure it’s far worse in Italy. When I visited a friend in Arezzo 6 y/a there were black prostitutes in caravans in lay-bys all along the mountain roads. The scale of the problems is beyond anyone’s capacity to resolve. 

We curse our politicians for failing to deal with what we the people cause by our conflicted priorities: EG demanding low taxes but also good civic services and effective social care. 

The EU and its member governments tried to create a fair framework for handling migrants, but it was wishful thinking; because the northern states simply refused to share the burden. And this all the pretext the demagogues for destroying the remaining social fabric of the European ideal. 

Suzi gave me a book on migration which shows that longterm solutions are impossible, because political instability around the Mediterranean and the range of satellite TV publicising western consumerism mean that Europe is an irresistible magnet, just as the USA is to SAmerica. 

If you look at the history of population movements from the Celtic era, there seem to have been these great migratory moves at many points in history. In Lyon for instance two distinct tribal settlements beside the Rhone stood alongside the Roman town on the hill, in a sort of functional apartheid; and of course the origin of the Jewish nation lies in migration mythology. But before today it didn’t matter because there was enough room for everyone. Now there isn't. 

I see this as the twilight of liberal democracy, and among the reasons is that we the people are largely ignorant of Christian principles. We have become a deracinated people, whose psyche no longer has roots in the transpersonal, with the result that we are blown by the winds of pleasure, and morally defenceless in the teeth of corporate forces. We were told that all the old ideas were irrelevant to the modern world, but nobody has come up with a better vision to replace them. It’s true that a new spirituality is growing, but much of it is consumerist in character, and being heterogeneous and individualistic it is incapable of putting down deep collective ethical roots. And thus its capacity to be a moral fulcrum is lacking. The Right seeks to exploit this moral vacuum by an appeal to the slogans of imperialistic Christian past, but ignores altogether the ethical heart of what it claims to promote. 

Yet we remain herd animals, and part of our psycho-somatic makeup is that we need to belong. How do we create those ethical magnets of elective affinity in the modern world that tap into and draw from the deep wellsprings of perennial wisdom that manifest in the best of all religious cultures, namely to honour the numinous within ourselves and to bring out the best in others? 

For all my difficult relations with the  Religious Society of Friends I still think it’s a great space for exploring the dilemmas of existence in a respectful silence, and that Quakers have historically got a great deal right about social organisation.