Juno - for International Women's Day

Last weekend I was interviewed about female role models for a film about IWD. I was doing well until I couldn't remember the word "intersectionality" - a mouthful at the best of times - and I kind of stumbled.  But it worked out okay, I think, because I  was able to explain the concept in more depth. And passion.

That experience had me remembering a talk I attended where someone suggested that, because educated middle-class women are doing okay these days, feminism is no longer necessary. I boiled silently (because I was working at the talk and couldn't storm the stage), but I promised myself I'd respond, and here's the (draft - it definitely needs work) poetic riposte, started last night - there are probably sufficient clues to work out who it was:

Juno

Here are lines on a screen,
Here are numbered truths,
Here is a quiet celebration,
A congratulatory stage.

And here is rage,
And disbelief.
I look up to you
And gauge the narrowness
Of your gaze
The ways your numbers
Let others tumble
Into what you have not said...

And you could be me
In twenty years' time,
White as milk,
Educated to the hilt,

Comfortably well-spoken,
The only discernible difference -
You do not love women
As I do.

And you smile kindly,
Talk of victory.
You consider the race run,
That we won,
Job done -
Down tools, everyone.

I wonder.
Do you see beyond
Your comfort
To even the streets
Outside your door,
Poor in sympathy
As you are rich
In every other measure
Deafened by your learning,
Unable to step into the head
Of the next woman,
Leaden legged,
Knocking on the pane
Above her head
Put back there, tidily,
By you.

How do you dare,
When the invisible millions
Howl for their aborted daughters,
The halters they wear,
The burdens they bear,
The gruelling lives of those
who cannot share
Your blessings,
Voiceless while you,
Who never bled for any other,
Claim to speak the lives
Of every woman born to silence.

You pluck the tongues
from their skulls
In big sisterly insistence
That you know best,
Wrest their stories
From their grasp,
Palm off their gasps
As needless attention-seeking.

What will we tell our daughters
About you -
Schooled to ruthlessness,
Deaf to the call of blood to blood,
Dumbfounding quintessence of smug,
Unwilling to touch the outstretched palms
Of those outside your graphs?

I will falter,
I will stumble,
I will seek to be proved wrong
As many times as I can bear
And bear up the steps of those
Who fall by the wayside of your carriage,

And those who move

On different paths from yours,
Celebrate the victories,
And rage for the pain,
Safe in the knowledge
That those I hold this close
Are true family.

And I will call you by

your real names
As loudly as I can,
And bare your shame.

Glimmer

It's hard to tell cause from effect
When you're miserably
Staving yourself into
Clichés of shrinking circles.

When all you know carries jagged edges
All the beckoning blanks
Shine like the shield
Of sunrise,
A blend of friendly colours
Far from the nag
Of carried damage.

I saw my father
Fall into gin
Like his mother before him
Felt the flicker of alarm
That whisky's blissful blankness
Brought me,
Foresaw the discipline of decades
Disappearing,
A rhythm of days
Blurred into
Just one more...

Blinked.
Dismissed this as a holiday from
Hurt - more expensive than its worth,
A three-times yearly treat, maybe.

I will pour my body
Into other moulds,
Grow boldly into
Resistance
Become the grist to my own mill
And thrill to the opium of fear,
Imbibed nightly, if I can stomach it.

Nothing sings through my veins
Like stand-up sounds,
Intent crowds,
A crown of sonnets
Polished verse,
Perverse lyrics
And the bliss of hitting silence
Just.
Right.

And in daylight I'll pound streets
And creaking joints,
Point out weakness and coax it
Into strength,
Count my blessings
And make more,
Not to avoid pain,
But to own the gain
Its absence accompanies

And take each slip
As a gift of growing,
And its own punishment,
Knowing only those alive
Feel its bite.

A windy walk under moonlight

My hair dances like
Treetops, mustering fingers
To grasp at the night.

Arise

Written for the first Cambridge Sunday Assembly - separate post here:

Arise

It starts with a breath
Deep as oceans,
Echoing everywhere,
The prelude to that first cry.

Dry-mouthed,
You are forgetting to remember:
You are a torrent,
The wellspring of everything

Reach out, touch fingertips
With existence,
embrace it,
Toe to toe with the moment

You are the boldness,
The heat in the heartbeat
The spark in the dark
That heralds the flourish of day

You are birdcall
And dewfall
And all that stirs before
Morning

You are thirst,
And its quenching,
You are strong muscles clenching
Before the first step

You are the elegance of
Potential catastrophe
And the forces summoned
To meet it.

And you are not the one
Who slept on
The one who kept
In darkness

You are the sunrise
You are the brightening skies
You are the one
Who opened your eyes.

Open your eyes.

You are the one who
Took breath and raised your voice
You are the billowing echo
Of making a choice.

Stand up,
Reach out, and
Don't stop.
It is a new day.

Echo Speaks Panegyric

Cross-posted from http://fayrobertspoet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/echo-speaks-panegyric.html because I keep forgetting to put the poems here...

Sing me the chorus of solos
And say true, my brothers and sisters...
These double wicks blister fingers,
A sinister glint in the eye
As we burn -
A pyre, sky-high - sacrifice
To the first Gods of civilisation
Nations crush nations,
Then go home and make oblation
To Apollo's horses -
We let others let the beast out.

We walking mirrors, thinking
That we express our true selves
Are conduits,
Priests of fear-of-failure
Of the terror of success
Of the gift of gesticulation
In the face of the infinite.

We double in time -
Lambs in the train,
Baring our tender necks,
And the goat who leads the way.
Dance, goat, dance.

We are will o' the wisp,
Stepping stones through
The quagmire.
And we will never,
Ever
Be truly seen
Except by the blind eyes of love,
And the faith of our own kind,
Lights in the dusk of a world
That processes its pain
Through these hands,
These eyes and voices,
And then rolls on.

By this point I'd been in Edinburgh for two weeks and was a bit tired., to say the least. This I wrote shortly after waking up...

The Politeness of Princes

Quite a few of you will have noticed that I have a bit of a problem with punctuality. I genuinely maintain that this is because I'm slightly time-dyslexic, but that might just be a feeble excuse masquerading as Greek-flavoured verisimilitude (and potentially offensive to actually dyslexic people). Anyway, turns out that I wrote (another) poem about this about 2 years ago. Have just found the notes for it today during a tidying binge; tidied version below:

This morning, time refused to function,
Fainting and failing,
Flapping like a Georgian hysteric,
Clutching at a shawl-draped,
Snow-white bosom, all fluttering eyelids.

I blinked and missed dollops of minutes,
Handfuls at a time while the lady
Gibbered, rolled her eyes, tore her hair,
Gasped for and pushed off attention.

You see, last night's sleep kept out of reach,
A stony suitor, all dark Byronic profile,
This morning's slumber all over me,
Hanging off extremities like a clingy second choice
I may have kissed once at a party.

Let them fight it out between themselves.
I pushed through chores and breakfast,
Dressing mechanically, commuting stoically,
Trudging past temptations
To make it into work on time. Just.

Earth Song - for Jill

Jill Eastland has an exhibition called "Our Land Our Lives" at The Six Bells in Covent Garden, Cambridge, 1-31 May. It's a series of statements inspired by and dedicated to the struggle of the Roma and other Traveller folk at Dale Farm and those who tried to defend them against their eviction. She asked me to perform at her opening private view tonight (along with the magnificent talents of host Johnny Marvel, poet Keely Mills, singer-songwriter Faith Taylor, and musician-sham David Crowbar) and I was inspired by her work (the titles of some of which turn up in the piece) to write the following tonight:

We are here.
On common land we stand
Entwined
Root and branch
Arc us earth to sky
And we fly - leaf-twist
On the good wind
Diving swift as hawk-stoop
To burrow underground.
We are rabbit-thump rumour,
The liquid trickle
Of brook-mimicking birdsong,
Soft and strong as running water.

And you cannot stop us,
Cannot choke the love
That is our breath.
We will erode you, drop by drop,
Weed-crack your concrete,
Rust you and reclaim you.
Entwined, eternal -
Root and branch, bird and rain -
We stand. Common land.
Forever.