DARKEST HOUR

When I tire of the wellness trade,

chafe at cut-price comfort,

then consent becomes a bomb

 

exploding inward. I would walk alone,

shake off dreary pleasantry.

For discontent must be there

 

even in the streets of heaven.

Beyond 24-hour convenience

night thickens in alleyways –

 

it is the landscape I must tread.

A mask in every pocket,

shadow no longer set by sun.

 

Air cools to its dew-point numbness.

Nose-to-tail the cars stand guard –

there’s a tinted windscreen

 

shattered like an asterisk.

I get around these vagrant roads

by cutting corners, taking

 

a straight line always

across the sleepless labyrinth.

Under the pavement, hidden hills

 

and buried water courses.

Striplight flickers through the pupil

of a window. My eye watching.

 

x. 2022

 

 

Dreich, Season 7 

Not Going Home – ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ *

It is not done, they said,

to chain yourself to palace railings.

Go breaking window glass

or hatchet works of art.

Slash telegraph wires,

fire-bomb post boxes, railway stations

and Great Yarmouth pier.

Or burn your slogans in golf courses.

Not the done thing at all.

 

It is not done, they said,

to slice through miles of fence

and with your supine bodies

blockade our missile base.

Nor enter there as teddy bears

to dance on the silos, keening.  

And when evicted, your camp destroyed,

to return, rebuild at night.

Not the done thing at all.

 

Not the done thing at all

to hang your banners over highways,

hijack state TV news, 

rip down his face and stamp on it.

To whirl your hijabs like a black flag sea.

Or burn them on sticks held high

then cut your unscarved hair.

They say it is not done.

Not yet, we say, not yet.

 

x. 2022

 

* ‘Women Life Freedom’ was first chanted by the Kurdish Women’s Movement in 2006 to give voice to their revolutionary philosophy.

Jina (Mahsa) Amini, whose murder at the hands of Iran’s ‘morality police’ triggered the uprising there, was Kurdish. Her name in Kurdish - Jina - was not officially recognised, and she may well have been more brutally treated because she wasn’t Persian.

Culture Matters Oct. 2002