Social commentary

28 September 1932 – 15 September 1973

 

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

The opposite of art is not ugliness, its indifference.

The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.

And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Elie Wiesel

Crooked bird

 

The word used was scoliosis

A curvature of the spine

That led to three days a week in the clinic

The straight backed women wore

Starched white coats and eyes of coldness

Eyes that are blank cold

Give out that signal

Eyes that told us be careful

We walked into bare white walled rooms

Yellow pine floors narrow high windows

Our mothers sat unknowing outside

The room swam with the sickening smell

Of pine maybe carbolic disinfectant

 

One wall was lined with wooden bars

Yellow pine bars from the floor to the ceiling

We were told

Take off your clothes

Except for underwear

 

So we sat silently on the benches

A line of crooked birds

 

We were told to climb the bars

Take our feet off the bars

And hang by our hands

And stare at the opposite wall.

It was a place to straighten out

The crookedness of our crooked backs

 

We were small thin young children

We did what we were told

We shared this endurance silently

We shared our bravery in silence too

Our courage with stubbornness

 

So we hung from the bars to straighten

Our crooked backs  like birds on a wire

Hanging out stretched

Our arms aching

 

When the pain of stretching

Made us cry

Tears brushed away with our own hands

On to bodices and vests

There was no warmth here

The quietness of endurance

We share, fades, spills

On the floor and disappears

It was a place to stretch the curve

And crookedness out of us

We were told to lie

Flat on the yellow wood floor

To flatten and straighten

 

Those who were unable

Had braces fixed

To their backs

 

Braces fixed to backs

To straighten

Crooked birds

 

And so it went on

Year after year

Straightening crooked birds

 

The walk home was best

A wagon wheel or malt-teasers

A treat for a crooked bird’s braveness

 

We crooked birds observe

The world at a different angle

We learn to think

Out of the box

Straightened people

Try to fix us in

It is like a fixation straight people have

To make everything the same

And if you don’t fit

You’re just not the same

A reject?

But crooked birds have a different habit

Of turning the world upside down

Looking from a different direction

Giving something more to life

To a world that’s become monochrome

In its drabness

So let’s go on breaking down the walls of boxes.

 

 

RAC

 

 

 

 

 

There’s something wrong

I’m pretty sure about it

But I’m having trouble

Putting my finger

On what it is right now.

 

At times I feel

As if my mind

Is being split in two

Maybe three, maybe four

It’s hard to keep tabs really.

 

Politicians

Go to war

To make peace

But the war grows

It seems out of control.

 

So to contain

The growing war

That they are unable to contain

The politicians decide

To start another war.

 

Politicians are wise

They know what’s what

And what they are doing

So I consider

It must be part of a plan.

 

But one part

Of my brain

Maybe it’s the left

Asks if there really is a plan

Or whether its idiocy.

 

After all history

Teaches us lessons

Not to do

Certain things again

And politicians are wise.

 

Some politicians

Studied history

In Universities

With many spires

They must be wiser than most.

 

But another part

Of my brain

Says you can’t be serious

Politicians are oblivious

To the past.

 

So the world is at war

Its spreading

Wherever you look

Like some kind of fire

Nobodies  dousing  the flames.

 

But every fourth year

We have sacrifices

That  take our mind off  it

And makes us feel much better

And not think of war.

 

There’s something wrong

I’m pretty sure about it

I wish the wars would stop

And politicians show

That they are really wise.

 

RAC

 

It was this place, in those days, those years

Rivers ran blackened as night in the valley

And opened coke oven doors lit the sky red

And green fields drowned in spit black spoil

It was this place where slow hunger and poverty

Stamped down, slammed its feet on the ground.

Children starved and mouths slept empty

Soup kitchens fed families hunger thinned

This place, this place where malnutrition and disease

Looked through every door, every window

And men marched to great cities to plead

Assistance for so many in a time of great need.

Men marched the length, the breadth of the country

And met the slit cold closed eyes of indifference

She told the stories of those days those years

And when it was her time to pack, to leave

She was small, just fourteen years of age

She was a small child travelling as a stranger

In those greyed days of the great depression

Think of a child travelling from a valley

To work in a grand bankers Chelsea Mansion

She spoke of survival, the cruel vicious lips

The vindictive unsmiling eyed housekeeper

Just because she couldn’t speak words of Welsh.

She worked as a maid for a florin, a few pennies

To send back home to her family in the valley

To support her parents, her brothers, her sisters

And in that she was like so many valley children

In that time, in that place in those years.

 

Excerpt from long poem.

 

Some days start with difficulty the aching

Of my bones through the night unrelenting

Worries roam uninterrupted my shallow sleep

These times invade the darkness of my peace

Progressives dissolve into prancing parody

Eyes no longer on the ball or the will to win

There is no distinction here, no pride

Voices reduced to a numbing incoherence

Overused words and a worn out score

Meanwhile the crying of the people

Goes unheard echoing unanswered

There seems no shame in this bickering

Dressing it up as something different

Even a blind man could see or hear

Something important vital has been lost

And there is that unending emptiness

Watching the dance of a prattling clown

And the gesticulations of a puppet mouthing

Over rehearsed words and tired phrases

But who is who and which is which

And so we are left with that odd echoing

A Welsh word “didoreth” comes to mind

I feel like closing the door on this silliness

But I worry for my children’s future

And all those children struggling out there

And they deserve so much better than this

Something, someone far far better.

 

RAC