Written by
Pam Ayres |
You know this world is complicated, imperfect and oppressed
And it’s not hard to feel timid, apprehensive and depressed.
It seems that all around us tides of questions ebb and flow
And people want solutions but they don’t know where to go.
Opinions abound but who is wrong and who is right.
People need a prophet, a diffuser of the light.
Someone they can turn to as the crises rage and swirl.
Someone with the remedy, the wisdom, and the pearl.
Well . . . they should have asked my ‘usband, he’d have told’em then and there.
His thoughts on immigration, teenage mothers, Tony Blair,
The future of the monarchy, house prices in the south
The wait for hip replacements, BSE and foot and mouth.
Yes . . . they should have asked my husband he can sort out any mess
He can rejuvenate the railways he can cure the NHS
So any little niggle, anything you want to know
Just run it past my husband, wind him up and let him go.
Congestion on the motorways, free holidays for thugs
The damage to the ozone layer, refugees and drugs.
These may defeat the brain of any politician bloke
But present it to my husband and he’ll solve it at a stroke.
He’ll clarify the situation; he will make it crystal clear
You’ll feel the glazing of your eyeballs, and the bending of your ear.
Corruption at the top, he’s an authority on that
And the Mafia, Gadafia and Yasser Arafat.
Upon these areas he brings his intellect to shine
In a great compelling voice that’s twice as loud as yours or mine.
I often wonder what it must be like to be so strong,
Infallible, articulate, self-confident …… and wrong.
When it comes to tolerance – he hasn’t got a lot
Joyriders should be guillotined and muggers should be shot.
The sound of his own voice becomes like music to his ears
And he hasn’t got an inkling that he’s boring us to tears.
My friends don’t call so often, they have busy lives I know
But its not everyday you want to hear a windbag suck and blow.
Encyclopaedias, on them we never have to call
Why clutter up the bookshelf when my husband knows it all!
© Pam Ayres 2012
Official Website
http://pamayres.com/
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Written by
Adrienne Rich |
Something spreading underground won't speak to us
under skin won't declare itself
not all life-forms want dialogue with the
machine-gods in their drama hogging down
the deep bush clear-cutting refugees
from ancient or transient villages into
our opportunistic fervor to search
crazily for a host a lifeboat
Suddenly instead of art we're eyeing
organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows
a beautiful tumor
•
I guess you're not alone I fear you're alone
There's, of course, poetry:
awful bridge rising over naked air: I first
took it as just a continuation of the road:
"a masterpiece of engineering
praised, etc.
" then on the radio:
"incline too steep for ease of, etc.
"
Drove it nonetheless because I had to
this being how— So this is how
I find you: alive and more
•
As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I'm driving to your side
—an intimate collusion—
packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain
glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck
rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden
poetries, old glue shredding from their spines
my time exposure of the Leonids
over Joshua Tree
As if we're going to win this O because
•
If you have a sister I am not she
nor your mother nor you my daughter
nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
except in the intensive care
of poetry and
death's master plan architecture-in-progress
draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
the master left on your doorstep
with a white card in black calligraphy:
Make what you will of this
As if leaving purple roses
•
If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I tell you a letter from the master
is lying on my own doorstep
glued there with leaves and rain
and I haven't bent to it yet
if I tell you I surmise
he writes differently to me:
Do as you will, you have had your life
many have not
signing it in his olden script:
Meister aus Deutschland
•
In coldest Europe end of that war
frozen domes iron railings frozen stoves lit in the
streets
memory banks of cold
the Nike of Samothrace
on a staircase wings in blazing
backdraft said to me
: : to everyone she met
Displaced, amputated never discount me
Victory
indented in disaster striding
at the head of stairs
for Tory Dent
|
Written by
Allen Ginsberg |
I -- A Pleasant Afternoon
for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup
One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest -- the wild wind blew thru
blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion's Club lunchwagon microwave
mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
& noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
tent flapped happily open spacious & didn't fall down.
June 18, 1978
II -- Peace Protest
Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
-- am I going to stop that?
*
Rocky Mountains rising behind us
Denver shining in morning light
-- Led away from the crowd by police and photographers
*
Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
to the greyhaired Sheriff's van --
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
Come back!
III -- Golden Courthouse
Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
Prisoners, witnesses, Police --
the stenographer yawns into her palms.
August 9, 1978
IV -- Everybody's Fantasy
I walked outside & the bomb'd
dropped lots of plutonium
all over the Lower East Side
There weren't any buildings left just
iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
stinking sewer waters
There were people starving and crawling
across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
waters
Charred Amazon palmtrees for
hundreds of miles on both sides
of the river
August 10, 1978
V -- Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant
"Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!"
the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
-- whap!
*
A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall!
"Life is fragile.
Handle with care" --
My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
triggers.
August 17, 1978
VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook
2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born
Summer 1978
|
Written by
Randall Jarrell |
In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment.
Is their calm extravagant?
They had faces and lives like you.
What was it they possessed
That they were willing to trade for this?
The dried blood sparkles along the mask
Of the child who yesterday possessed
A country welcomer than this.
Did he? All night into the waste
The train moves silently.
The faces are vacant.
Have none of them found the cost extravagant?
How could they? They gave what they possessed.
Here all the purses are vacant.
And what else could satisfy the extravagant
Tears and wish of the child but this?
Impose its canceling terrible mask
On the days and faces and lives they waste?
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant
Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death's rehearsal.
Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces: What is there we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
When Blunkett starts to talk like Enoch Powell
I think of Harold Wilson’s statue in Huddersfield Station
Caught striding forward, gripping his pipe in his pocket,
Hair blowing in the wind.
could we but turn that bronze
To flesh I would have asked him to meet the two
Asylum-seekers I met in Huddersfield’s main street
And asked directions from.
"We are Iranian refugees",
They stammered apologetically.
"Then welcome to this country.
"
I said as we shook hands, their smiles like the sun.
|
Written by
Charles Simic |
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room.
The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
|
Written by
Mercy Otis Warren |
Modest! Polite! Genteel! Heavens what deceit
Dwells in the breast of those I termed grat!
But now too late, my shame and grief appear.
I'm lost! Undone! Stopped short in my career.
A barn my dwelling, paltry fish my food,
With insuylts, scorn, and execrations lewd.
Oh sad disgrace! But this is not the worst.
I'm by my husband and my daughter cursed.
Our Bashaw, to, forever in a tease,
Vents his dire spleen on us, poor refugees.
Accursed state, from towering hopes I've fell,
To her with transports and such devils dwell.
One tear my injured country week for me,
And for that tear, may you be ever free.
|
Written by
Brooks Haxton |
The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth
the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in
the blood of the wicked.
Psalm 58
It was the fortieth year since Buchenwald: two thousand
Jewish refugees in Sudan starved while Reagan visited
the graves of Nazis.
CBS paid off Westmoreland
for their rude disclosure of his lies and crimes:
he had killed thirty of the enemy, let’s not forget,
for every one lost us: he was owed something.
That year, though, no terrorist could touch God’s work
in Mexico and north of Bogota: an earthquake here,
volcano there, and numbers do not signify the dead,
each corpse incomprehensible as to the widow Klinghoffer
her Leon, shot, dumped overboard as if to make a point.
Westmoreland said, the Viet Cong could be indentified
from the attacking aircraft as all personnel in uniform
below.
Their uniform, he told us, was the native dress.
|
Written by
Warsan Shire |
No one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well.
your neighbours running faster than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home when home won't let you stay.
no one would leave home unless home
chased you, fire under feet, hot blood in your belly.
it's not something you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did - you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow, each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.
you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.
who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles traveled meant something more than journey.
no one would choose to crawl under fences, be beaten until your shadow leaves you, raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of the boat because you are darker, be sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, be pitied, lose your name, lose your family, make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side
with “go home blacks”, “refugees dirty immigrants”, “asylum seekers sucking our country dry of milk”,
dark, with their hands out smell strange, savage - look what they've done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?
the dirty looks in the street softer than a limb torn off, the indignity of everyday life more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child's body in pieces - for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.
i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.
no one leaves home until home is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don't know what I've become.
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