Sunday 13 March 2011

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.

Friday 11 March 2011

Bradley Manning - The Forgotten Man


Bradley Manning is a 22 year old Army intelligence analyst , not a person I know personally but he spent his schooldays down the road from me in Pembrokeshire. He went to school in Tasker Milward where he is remembered for his integrity and intelligence. His mum, aunts and uncles still live in Pembrokeshire.
I personally believe him to be one of the bravest people of our time, it is being alleged that he released information to Wikileaks of abuse and corruptibilty in the army and governments. Barak Obama himself has said that whistleblowers themselves have an important part to play in democratic societies.
One of the videos he allegedly shared contained images of a US helicopter attack that killed 11 innocent civilians in Baghdad, Iraq. The Army, however  soon covered up this evidence of a war crime and somehow declared it "justified". Now they brand the exposing of this and their part in a massacre criminal. They have also accused Bradley of having shared documentation of similar atrocities ( " Collateral Murder" ) in Afghanistan.
Bradley has been identified as a person of interest regarding the release of  90,000 battlefield reports describing civilian deaths inflicted by occupation forces in Afghanistan, collusion with warlords, corruption, and an unvarnished view of a decade-long war. But still no actual charges have been made against him.
Instead of being lauded he has since been persecuted and hung out to dry.


Since these things have happened things have got far worse for Bradley as the Independant Newspaper and the News Statesman has reported. Beneath the U.S's veneer is the brutal treatment he has recieved. He has now been locked up for 8 months, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day, kept in a prison cell 6 feet wide and 12 feet high, ritually forced to spend days naked, simply because he embarressed the US army, and shown the world how lax their security is that a 22 year old could access all their information and simply download it onto his ipad or memory stick. Does any human deserve such humiliation, especially in a country where their is so much talk of freedom in other peoples lands. Is this the world that we live in now, I believe that instead of being treated like a common criminal we should be showing him gratitude, and he should be rewarded for bringing these abuses of military and governmental power to our attention. God knows what will happen to Julian Assanges if the Americans get their hands on him. Bradley's health is now beginning to deteriorate, he has become withdrawn and catatonic , feels persecuted and is now barely able to communicate.Is this how America treats its heroes. Mistreated and abused ! For humanities sake we must challenge this, e.mail your M.P, your AssemblyMember, Congreessman, Barak Obama himself, sign online petitions, anything. We simply can't afford to forget this honourable man.. http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Tuesday 8 March 2011

INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY / A Century beyond the Fragments.1911-2011

Some writings for International Womens Day.

SARA TEASDALE (1884 -1933)

American Poet, work much influenced by Christina Rossetti. Died after an overdose.


There Will come soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of thewar, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.


Irina Ratushiskaya (4/3/54)

I Shall Write

I shall write about all the sad people
Who have remained on the shore
About those who have been condemned to silence-
I shall write.
Then burn what I have written.
Oh, how these lines will soar,
How the sheets of paper will fall back
Under the fierce blast
Of irrepparable emptiness!
With what haughty movement
The fire will outstrip me!
And the ashen foam will tremble.
But give birth to nothing.

Henriettte Roland- Holst (24/12/1865 - 21/11/52)

Henriette Roland Holst was born in Amsterdam. A student of Marx, she joined the Socialist Party, but broke away and founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1915.
Her poetry shocked readers at the time for its unorthodox rhyme and rhythyms and its subject matter.

Untitled.

Throughout the day we are able to ban the voices
Because the task takes all our strength,
But when day's fruit has ripened ito evening
We feel the many questions tightening like bows.

Half content we settle around lamps
Ans around the sadbess-defeating hearth's fire,
Relieved that the day which has emptied
Has left no dregs of greater pain.

For there is always something that we fear;
We are like the wives of fishermen at sea
Who day after day scan water and wind:
All they have heaves on the waves.

Our heart is embarked on world-whirling;
Storms and stillnesses move us,
Surf breaks against us, and we feel
Each shuddering go through our depths.


Clara Zetkin (1857-1933)

Was a German, Marxist law reformer, pacifist and political anarchist. Jailed in 1914 for anti-war activities.


... far too many do not shrink from demanding from the workers once more new sacrifices of blood and property for imperialist wars. ' We went through the World War with its terrible demands and horrors, let the young men now bear what we had to bear,' so declaim, in heroic pose, men who in their time in the trenches piteously complained of being cannon fodder for capitalist profits, and ater the conclusion of peace swore, 'no more war.' The meaness of their attitude is self evident. The progressive workers have always felt it to be their elementarry duty that the fight of the 'old generation' should spare oncoming youth the pain that they have suffered, in order that the youth might reap where their fathers sowed, in order that they might grow beyond them, promoting the rise of mankind to higher life in freedom and culture. With our glances firmly fixed on the fate, the rights and the tasks of the youth, we say: 'The workers against imperialist wars.'

In the misery-laden atmosphere, with the unemployment totalling thirty-five millions, not a few are led astray by the imperialist war provocateurs and war makers, through the illusion that massacres of the peoples will provide bread. Men and women whose years have suffered bitter want, who have often hungered and frozen for months together without bread or shelter, find employment in war industries. Their propertyless , exploited slave existence compels them to hard servile labour there. The boom in the armament industry allows its controlling, profit-swallowing 'magnates' to pay to individual working men and women and clerks, and to small groups of them, higher wages for overtime and premiums for special output. Such expenditure is tainted with the corruption of bribery for the purpose of splitting the workers and crippling their power of resistance to imperialst wars; they are insurance premiums paid for carrying through the latter. The growth of the armament madness of the bourgeois states increases their miltary budgets and their need for revenue. For what those employed in the armament industry take home as wages, the masses of the workers must pay in taxes and through tariffs.

TOGETHER LET US ALL WORK TOGETHER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE






Monday 7 March 2011

GENERAL STRIKE - ERIC DROOKER


AWAKENING!

Trees offer shelter
as spring gives promise
and we go mad with song.
Blue haze and mist
comes creeping, wraps around
whispers protection.
Images of broken light
gently obstruct
barricades still being formed.
Far beyond stars move
look down
nature finds a soul,a voice.
From distant borders
winds scatter delusions
pokes in corners
shoots out branches ,earth answers back.
Petal bombs explode
sending magic echoes into dark clouds
buds wake early to greet the dawn.
Time drifts alongside never forgetting what is lost,
digging away the ground beneath our feet
epic heartbeats rise and fall.
New cadences sap and spin towards the infinite
shadows irreversibally change the paradox of seeing
a choreographed bloom, effortlessly rearranged.

Friday 4 March 2011

A Poem Like a Grenade. - John Haines ((June 29, 1924 – March 2, 2011)


John Meade Haines, who was born n Norfolk, Virginia, published nine  collections of poetry and numerous works of nonfiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book ' The Stars,The Snow, The Fire.
In May 1947 he decided to move to Alaska, which had a decisive effect on his life and work.
He built a cabin on a deserted hillside above the Tanana River about 70 miles southeast of Farbanks in a spotso remote that he claimed ne could walk north from his homestead all the way to the Artic Ocean and never cross a road or encounter a village.
LivIng alone most of the tme, Haines spent 25 of the next 42 years in the Alaskan interior. In this isolated landscape he would become self-reliant largely supporting himself through hunting and trapping.
He had to relearn what his ancestors knew, how to live off the land. Working as a hunter, grdener, fisherman, trapper and homesteader. He also used these solitary years to master another primitive craft,making poems.
He was appointed the Poet Laureate of Alaska in 1969. A collection of critical essays about his poetry The Wilderness of Vision,  was published  in 1998. He went on to teach graduate level and honors English classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He died in Fairbanks, Alaska aged 86.
Alaska has lost one of its most creative minds.  singular and prophetic  voice of the times and the world in which we live.

A Poem like a Grenade

It is made to be rolled down
a flight of stairs,
placed under a guilty hat,
or casually dropped into a basket
among the desks
of the wrongheaded statesmen.

As it tumbles on the carpeted stairs
or settles quietly
in its wire-wicker nest,
it begins to unfold,
a ragged flower whose raw petals
burn and scar...

Its wastepaper soil catches fire,
the hat is blown from its hook.
Five or six faces are suddenly,
permanently changed...

There will be many poems written
in the shape of a grenade-
one hard piece of metal flying off
might even topple a government.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Y Ddraig Goch - Henry Treece (22/12/11 - 19/6/66 )

Henry Treece was a midlander of Welsh parentage who was particularly known as a childrens novelist, but also wrote  adult historical novels.
Dragons are leader, but are prone to slumber until aroused, then it is a force to be reckoned with, powerful and mysterious. Beware, one  woken inspires action. Slays apathy.
Dydd Dewi Sant hapus/ Happy St David's Day

The dragon of our dreams roared in the hills
That ring the sunlit land of children's songs.
Red with the lacquer of a fairy tale,
His fiery breath fried all besieging knights.
Whole seasons could he lay the land in waste
By puffing once upon the standing corn!

He was our dragon dressed in red, who kept
Sly ghosts from lurking underneath the thatch,
And made the hen lay dark-brown eggs for tea.
One word to him, just as you went to bed,
Made Twm, the postman, call next afternoon;
"Ho, Bachgen," That is what he'd say, "Just look,
A fine blue postal-order from your Mam!
Twm gets a pint for being that, I bet!"

The dragon cured us when the measles came,
And let the mare drop me a coal-black foal.
He taught us where nests lay, and found us fish,
Then thawed the snow to save the winter lamb.

Ho, Ddraig Goch, my pretty, pretty friend!
We were his children, knowing all his ways;
We laid out nightly gifts beneath the hedge,
Five linnet's eggs, a cup, a broken whip,
And heard his gracious sighs sweep through the trees.
But tears for all the fools who called him false!
One lad who sniggered fell down Parry's well;
The English Parson had a plague of warts;
Old Mrs Hughes was bitten by a cat;
The school roof fell in when the teacher smiled!

Ho, Ddraig Goch, they tell me you are dead;
They say heard you weeping in the hills
For all your children gone to London Town.
They say your tears set Tawe in a flood.
I'm older now, but still I like to think
Of your grat green glass-green eyes fixed on the Fferm,
Guarding the children, keeping them from harm.

Don't die, old dragon, wait a few years more,
I shall come back and bring you boys to love.

Picture of Henry Treece.