The Djibouti Road

Posted on by celfypridd

 

Karrayyuu Hotel night

 

Drinking St Georges beer in the shade

of the top floor of the Karrayyuu hotel

watching vultures and black kites

perform smooth spiralling turns

on updrafts above the Matahara

slaughter house while the sun sets

on the caldera of Mount Fantalle.

In darkness the truck stop is a death stop

in the dance room hard rock plays

harsh shrieking uncontrolled laughter

hookers bump and grind and shine

glistening with sweat and AIDS reigns

at each stop the virus spreads.

We lie under a skagged mosquito net

sleep evades us as we lie listening

for that high pitched whine in the din

of the rhythm of the pounding bass.

Death comes and falls in many forms

in a truck stop on the deep rutted Djibouti road

in the dried out summer of the Rift Valley.

Everyone waits for rain.

 

©RobCullen

Children’s Games – Remember?

Posted on by celfypridd

“The literature of childhood abounds with evidence that the peaks of a child’s experience are not visits to the cinema, or even family outings to the sea, but occasions when he escapes into places that are disused and overgrown and silent. To a child there is more joy in a rubbish tip than a flowery rockery, in a fallen tree than a piece of statuary, in a muddy track than a gravel path.”

Iona Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Dueling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, and Pretending

Lest we forget

Posted on by celfypridd

Carl von Ossietzky, (born Oct. 3, 1889, Hamburg, Germany —died May 4, 1938, Berlin.

Carl von Ossietzky was  a German journalist and pacifist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1935.Ossietzky opposed German Militarism and political extremism of both the left and the right. By the time Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, Ossietzky had resumed his editorship, in which he uncompromisingly attacked the Nazis.

Refusing to flee Germany, he was arrested on Feb. 28, 1933, and sent to Esterwegen-Papenburg concentration camp. After enduring three years of incarceration and torture in the camp, Ossietzky was transferred in May 1936 to a prison hospital in Berlin by the German government, which was growing alarmed at the international publicity his case had begun to attract. Ossietzky was mercilessly mistreated by the guards while being deprived of food.

In November 1935, when a representative of the International Red Cross visited Ossietzky, he reported that he saw “a trembling, deadly pale something, a creature that appeared to be without feeling, one eye swollen, teeth knocked out, dragging a broken, badly healed leg . . . a human being who had reached the uttermost limits of what could be borne”.