Friday 25 December 2015

Well- it's a bit rough round the edges but here's a poem for Christmas 2015

In between doing all the usual Christmas things, making a big meal and looking after Mother, I had time to scribble a few thoughts


CHRISTMAS 2015
Each one of us is born
Each one of us will die,
We come into this world
A divine spark of life,
We grow and become
And try to share our light,
Then we all pass 
Into the night.

I just want to know it all makes sense
I just want to feel there’s a reason we’re here,
When everything’s hard and I’m full of pain,
I want to know God is here.

When my sister is starving and cold,
And my brother is caught up in war,
And change is too sudden, and all seems lost,
And politicians only trumpet fear,
When little children who could have been me,
Tramp across deserts, desperate to flee,

I don’t need to know there’s life after death,
I don’t need to be washed in more blood,
There’s too many dying for others’ sins,
I just need to know God is near.

The wonder of life is
A great gift to us all.
Then it just empties away
After being so full.
Is it death that makes us
So fearful of life?
So we lay waste the Earth
Who gave us all birth?

I don’t need to make a crusade
To stand up and proclaim a Name.
Life is a fog, nothing is clear,
All I need to know is God is near.

So, a divine child was born of woman,
That miracle happens every day.
If we think it was only the once
We’ve missed what He was trying to say.
If I don’t see Christ in my enemy’s face,
And I don’t see God when I look within,
Then I’m just going to continue to
Make others die for my sins.

I don’t need your foolish Resurrection,
If you lay the Earth to waste here,
While you preach your hate and poison the world.
I need you to know God is near.


Wednesday 2 December 2015

THE SALMON OF WISDOM

THE SALMON OF WISDOM

In the pool of my heart
Is all that my wise waters have gathered
Drip by gathering drip
Slow trickles of wisdom
In cool brown depths.

Flies dart over my lilied surface
Fragments of glimpsed truths rise
And dissolve back into essence.
The tinc-tincing blackbird alights on
Lichened hazel-bough,
Yellow-beak, tapping the stone, marking time.
Red berries grow by my pool, and mirror
My eyes in their shining surfaces.

I rise and nibble what drops into my waters
Never fearing barbed hook because
All is one.
My silvered flanks are
A whisper of the in-between places.



Sunday 29 November 2015

Another child's poem- Elephant

Elephant
O Elephant, Elephant! You giant of Earth
Your step is mighty, enormous your girth.
When you walk with a mighty thud
You are an earthquake that trembles my blood.

O Little one, Little One! That’s your belief.
To myself I’m as light as a leaf.
I skip lightly, dancing the Earth,
Birds circle my ears and my tusks are curved.

A nose like a tongue that I use like a hand,
I can delicately pick, or mightily slam.
I speak in a voice too low for your ears,
But I am singing the song of the spheres.

I am guardian of the Land, my footprints become lakes,
My grandmothers know the paths I must take.   
My memory’s so long I understand death,
And always mourn the last dying breath.

So, Little One, though you think I am massive,
And heavy and craggy like a big cliff,
That little beetle who walks on the ground
Thinks HE is the biggest thing around. 

Hiraeth – a Welsh word meaning longing for home.

HIRAETH

Hiraeth is in my bones.
My tide of longing
For that far star
That shines so faithfully
In my night sky,
Its hard brilliance a beckoning,
Far-heard call
Over the night-waves
Of my breathing, sighing sleep.

My bones quietly disintegrate.
I return to essence,
And find the one tiny particle of self
Amid star-sand.



·         

Poem about revisiting a memory from my childhood home

Toffee Coloured Flint

In that place where the flints
Are toffee-coloured,
A cold, snot-drawing
Wind cuts to the
Quick white-packed sky
Glaring heavy on those
Ridges you only notice
Now on the bark of
The bare-stripped tree.
That oak-apple almost sings
In the grey-white light
And only the stones
Still hold a memory of
Summer heat-haze and
Sandals scuffing in
The green-scented
Dry of the path.

The deep amber of
The flint holds more
Than memory of summer.

Place. Self. And Dream.
All there, prefigured
In calcite. 

Thursday 12 November 2015

Poem accepted by Reuben Woolley's I am Not a silent Poet webzine

https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/on-reading-about-two-children-under-11-who-were-raped-by-soldiers-in-sudan-by-cath-blackfeather/

On reading about two children under 11 who were raped by soldiers in Sudan

If I were the only little girl
Who was held down
And raped
That would be one too many.

If these two little girls
Whose bodies were split apart,
Their secret, sacred places
Made into raw meat,
Were the only ones,
That would be too many.

I am sinking under
The sewage tide of
Laughing, cheerful men,
With eyes fixed zealously on
Their great tasks,
The wonders they will perform
To make the world in their own image,
While little bodies lie stunned
Under them.
I can’t give up,
Because they don’t.
I have to keep going,
Because they do.

My crone-womb hangs
Like a dry piece of meat
In the bone-bowl of me.
But it speaks in the quietest,
Deepest voice of all.
A whisper that is of the Earth.
That shrieks the rage the outrage
Of us all.
It is our blood that is sacrificed
In this most un-sacred way.

When mothers tramp thousands of miles
To find a safe place for their daughters
And are turned away, traded and discarded,
Again and again.
And they walk on, further.
I, too, must hold on.
Because they do.
I have to remember who I am,
Because they do.


Friday 23 October 2015

Caring for my mother in the face of Tory austerity in the NHS

22 Oct 2015

We hear all the time about the gradual nibbling away of the NHS - public-private partnerships, out-sourcing of services to private companies, and now – since the election that saw this bunch of total bastards get back into power – a faster, harder squeeze on the service that will surely result in the total privatization of our beloved health service.  This isn’t really a political rant, but to point out how the political and private can never be separated when our lives are being so drastically affected by government. 
When my mother needs to use the NHS it seems the same as it’s always been. Unpleasant, yes, overcrowded and uncomfortable at times, but she’s never been let down by them.  In fact, she decided to let her private health insurance go as the only thing she ever used it for was her checkups with the eye-specialist, which costs less that the excess on her policy, so she just pays him when she sees him and it costs her less than having an expensive private health-care scheme.
But for everything else she just gets dealt with by the NHS quickly and efficiently. When she blacked out four times in half an hour, about 5 years ago, I just used the emergency button she'd had installed by Social Services and an ambulance turned up really fast. She had to wait several hours in A & E to get a hospital bed, but no private health-care plan would provide that kind of service anyway.
But this past year I’ve had to use ambulances to get her to out-patient appointments, as she has been unable to climb stairs to get out of the house, and so needed to be carried up. I’ve noticed that the crews that turn up to take her are private companies.  I’ve no idea how long that has been going on, probably for years, but how would I know that if I’m not using them? 
Now I have a wheelchair ramp dug out and graveled up the side of the house, by my brother while he and his wife were looking after Mum. I’m always trying to plan two steps ahead of what is needed and found the whole process of trying to book an ambulance to transport Mum so difficult that I realized this would be a useful thing to have. And it has proved itself already. 

But we needed to call an ambulance a couple of weeks ago when Mother was so weak from lack of breath that she collapsed, while she was with the carer and I was away from the house.  Fortunately I was not far away, so I got back and took charge within 15 minutes.
The carer and I both knew Mum only needed help to get up off the floor. She was not injured.  The reason for her collapse was already being dealt with, as she had an appointment to have her lung looked at by bronchoscopy later that same week. All we needed was some strong, trained people to help us get her up off the floor. She was so weak she couldn’t get onto all-fours in order for us to get her up from that onto a nearby piece of furniture, which is the usual method of getting someone up from a fall.  So I called the emergency services so they could get her onto a stretcher and carry her to her bed.  Ambulance crew are the only part of the professional health or care services that are legally permitted to lift a patient these days. A private individual like me, can lift, and injure their back, but not anyone who is doing it as a paid job.  Fair enough.
I don’t know if what happened next was to do with the fact that they were a private ambulance company, but I got the impression that’s what they were. Maybe it was because it was a weekend – a Sunday evening.  It wasn’t even that the level of training they had was clearly not very high – I didn’t need highly trained paramedics, I only wanted muscle, not brains.  But the litigation-conscious ambulance crew were just not prepared to take responsibility for leaving a patient at home, with a possible, (entirely imaginary) “head-injury” – a very small carpet burn just behind one ear, which had bled a bit.
The result was that at one time we had 5 ambulance crew (two ambulances plus an advance assessment bloke who arrived in his own car) and we were subjected to four hours of what I can only describe as bullying to get me to agree for her to go into hospital, rather just to her own bed. 
It was just horrible. They left Mother lying on the floor for another hour before they got her up. Of course, I had put a folded duvet under her and covered her with a blanket, but she was still cold and painful from the hardness of the floor after lying there for a total of over two hours. 
I mean, I get that they have to make an assessment and do tests etc.  I get that they have their paperwork to fill in. I get that they can’t just lift a patient without really being sure it’s the best thing to do.  But five crew, all stepping over her as she lay there, saying it was more than their job’s worth not to take her to A & E (on a Sunday evening!!!???? Exactly how would that have been better for her than staying in her own bed????)  When I said she was not to go to hospital, that the cut behind her ear was clearly not a head injury, did not require stitches or gluing or whatever they said, they just wouldn’t accept my, or my mother’s clearly stated wishes.  What is it if someone takes you against your wishes?  Assault? Kidnapping? False imprisonment?
I didn’t let it get to that point - I just called my brother-the-doctor.  As in – “My brother is a doctor – a consultant – you can talk to him.”   Again - I use the fact that two of my brothers are doctors all the time to get a bit more consideration and respect from health professionals, but it still galls me that they felt neither Mother nor I were able to make a correct decision in this situation. What would I have done if brother had not been in?   I mean - I can’t go round being rude to these people, I might need them again, probably will, at some point in the near future.
Anyway – brother-the doctor/consultant was there and gave the ambulance crew-member who reckoned he was qualified to say Mum had a potentially serious head-injury, a very brusque talking to and that ended all their attempts to take her to hospital. Plus - they heard me complain to brother that I had five of them all crowded into Mum’s living room, so they sent one of them away. That left four of them to get her up.
Did they bring in a stretcher and keep her horizontal?  No! They decided they weren’t allowed to do that – so they got her up to standing, which obviously took all four of them.  Even though she’s tiny and only weighs 6 stone 4, they still can’t just haul her up. They did that well, she didn’t get any more bruises in the process, and then they sat her in her own wheelchair to get her into the bedroom. Even then, I had to explain that they had to take her down the ramp backwards as the supposedly qualified ambulance crew tried to take her down forwards, risking tipping her out of the chair.  And I had to get her from the chair to the bed, as I was the one with all the experience at moving Mother.  Poor Mum, she’d fallen just as she was about to have a cup of tea. It was now about 8 pm and she’d missed supper too.  So she was thirsty and cold, but was so fed up she just wanted to be left to go to sleep.
Even then I couldn’t get rid of them! Two left, but the remaining two stayed on, insisting they had to get someone out to dress my mother’s head wound. Apparently none of them are allowed to do this. WTF?????!!!! They kept phoning up different parts of the emergency services, while I sat there, starving, as I, too, had had no supper.  I texted my brother who told me I was allowed to order them to leave. He would say that, wouldn’t he? He’s a doctor - used to giving orders to hospital staff.  Basically I was being bullied and neither Mother nor I could do anything about it.  Finally at around 10 pm, I got them to leave after promising faithfully that I would take Mum to a walk-in minor injuries department the next day.  But they still couldn’t leave until the one crew who had said and done nothing the whole time, went in and put a great big bandage on the side of her head, making her look like Pudsey the Bear, or Mr Bump.  She pulled that off half an hour later as it was stuck to her hair.  The next day she couldn’t even work out which side of her head she’d sustained this massive injury, it was so totally un-painful.  When I washed her hair later that week, and cleared the dried blood from it, there was a tiny mark less than a centimeter long where the skin had broken. Needless to say, neither of us considered it necessary to take her to a minor injuries department to have her “wound” stitched.

All of this made me so furious.  On one of the busiest nights of the week for A & E, two whole ambulance crews were tied up, plus the advance guy. Mostly doing nothing.  For hours.  But it was far more important that they cover their arses than to actually do what was needed.  I’d like to tie this in with all the cuts and privatization of the NHS, but maybe it’s more to do with litigation than privatization. All I know is that even a few years ago this would not have happened. My closest friend had ambulance crew out on several occasions to help get her father up from the floor when he was developing a form of dementia that causes sudden falls, and no-one demurred at needing to lift him, a far heavier person than my mother.  

In my usual careful, forward-planning way I have decided that I will do anything rather than call an ambulance crew again, unless I actually DO need Mum to go to hospital, or there is absolutely no-one else around to help me.  To make this possible I have purchased a light-weight, folding stretcher from eBay (courtesy of US Army surplus). My plan is to call the next-door neighbor (who unfortunately wasn’t there this time). He and I can use the folded duvet under Mother as a kind of hammock to lift her onto the stretcher and from there get her to bed. This would be far less distressing for Mother as it would keep her horizontal, and only needs two people to do it, rather than the four it takes to get her up to standing.   Even if I do have to call the ambulance crew – if there’s no neighbour to help us – I will get the stretcher out and tell them this is the way we do it. I find they are usually persuadable if I say we’ve done it that way before.
Over this past year I’ve seen Mother deteriorate so fast. She’s no longer able to walk the short distance between living-room chair and bedroom, or to use the bathroom and shower.  She knows she’s not got long, and has accepted this with dignity and grace – even to the point of discussing with us about end-of-life decisions (do not resuscitate) – but as if that weren’t bad enough, I now have my fears about the even more rapid deterioration of the NHS (I should call that destruction) to deal with too.  The UK Health Service is in the top 3 on every count of world-wide league tables and the US Health Service is near the bottom on those same league tables, but somehow we are supposed to believe that we would be better off following the US model. (Whilst simultaneously believing the NHS is safe in this government’s hands)   I’m not looking forward to the time when Mother is in intensive care, dying, but I wasn’t dreading it nearly so much when I started living with her and caring for her, before all this Tory austerity shite began to happen.






Monday 14 September 2015

Another anti-sexism rant I wrote a few months ago and forgot to post

I’ve been working on this thought for a while - trying to find the best words to say it, let me run this past you to see if this makes sense to you. 
When feminists talk about the patriarchy they are talking about a social, political, institutional, legal structure that condones violence against women by men.  When men beat up or rape women they are not doing it because they are mixed-up, or wounded, or they were pushed too far and couldn’t control themselves.  They are doing it because they believe they are entitled to do it purely and solely because they are men, and men are entitled to treat women like that.  They are acting on behalf of all men – saying, to the world of men – ‘I’m doing it the way it’s meant to be done.’
Yes - I get that not all men are like that. I know and respect that there are men out there who like and respect women and see their partners as that - not as punch-bags. I get that. I also know and understand that men are abused by women too, emotionally, physically, possibly even sexually. I get that. That’s not the point.  The minute you get into that ‘Yeh, well, what about men?’  thing, or ‘Don’t tar us all with the same brush,’ you have made sure that there can be no further discussion of these issues.  It just becomes competitive victim-playing. I get that if you are one of those men who respects women, understands that his woman life-partner is a companion, not just a commodity,  and wants his daughters to grow up strong and believing in their rights to exist as an equal, then it must feel like shit to hear women talking about ‘All men.’  I get that your hackles rise up defensively when women publish statistics about the numbers of women killed by their male partners, or raped. 
I also do know that men are abused by their female partners, and even though they are rarely in fear of their lives, the damage caused by emotional abuse is still horrendous. There is an appropriate forum and manner to discuss these issues and I’m glad that men are finding these.  But not in the context of comparing it to the violence done to women by men throughout the world.

The best way to make that point is to compare it to racism.  We live in a world that culturally, politically, financially, legally, institutionally gives whites a privileged position in relation to people of colour.  That’s just a fact.  I didn’t make it like that, I haven’t done anything to reinforce or justify white supremacy. I know I’m not a racist and I treat everyone with respect and never make assumptions about them because of their race or culture.  But I am white. I live in a white world. And when I see on the news that some black guy has been shot by a white guy, just for being black, when I read the statistics of the rates of imprisonment of blacks compared to whites, when I see the results of social deprivation caused by unequal treatment – it’s not the time for me to start saying ‘Yeh, well, I’ve had my problems too, you know. I didn’t get to where I am in life because of privilege and I had to work for it,’ etc etc. It’s not the time to start whining about how blacks just assume I’m a racist because I did something that upset one individual – all that crap. 
Competitive victim-playing does not change anything. That’s the purpose of it – to stop change from happening.
When you, as a man, say ‘Yer, but what about…’ when you are confronted by those statistics, then you are condoning the status quo.  You are allowing the only important issue to be side-tracked, and that issue is ‘How can we change this?’  
There is only one response when I as a white woman see a black person being arrested and harassed by white police, being beaten, killed in custody, any of that, just because they are black – and that is to stand up and shout ‘NOT IN MY NAME!!’
There is only one response by a man when he see the statistics about rape and violence by men against women.  Stand up and shout ‘NOT IN MY NAME.’ 

When you do that you are saying ‘I, as a man, do not condone this.’
That is the only way things will change.




Sexism .... again. And again. And again. why do we still have to explain this stuff?

A message in response to a Facebook friend (no longer) who posted this-  

Dear humourless Feminazi friends, can I just clarify that if I say your profile picture is "stunning", what I mean is it's so dull that I literally fall unconscious from the tedium.

How fucking dare you post this on your page?  How dare you – with your word ‘feminazis’ – imply that women who demand respect are Nazis?
There were several research experiments back in the 70s, when feminism was still fairly new, that demonstrated that when teachers were scrupulously fair in dividing their attention 50/50 between boys and girls in the classroom, the boys ALWAYS perceived the teachers as giving ALL the attention to the girls.
Likewise, researchers have found that men always perceive a roomful of people, with exactly equal numbers of men and women, as being full of women, not half and half.
This is the reaction of privileged people when inequality is redressed. When their privileges are removed and replaced by exactly equal treatment, they see themselves as victims of discrimination. This is what is meant by the phrase “a sense of entitlement.”  I have frequently attended workshops where women were in the majority, with only 1 or 2 men, and the men never failed to comment on how they feel at a disadvantage. If a woman, who has battled her way up through the ranks of some male-dominated career, to find herself attending a meeting where she is the only woman, draws attention to the fact in that way, she is generally judged to be angry and victim-playing.
The same is true for black people in a white world.  As a white, educated, middle-class woman, I know I can feel very hurt by any suggestion that I might be racist because of some unthinking comment.  It’s my privileged position that makes me feel entitled to react like that. My black colleague would be expected just to smile and stay quiet, no matter how offensive the casual assumptions white people make.
So – when a woman tells you, my male friend, that you are being offensively sexist by commenting on her appearance in a workplace context, if  you feel stung and victimized by her anger, that is your sense of entitled privilege reacting. 
We women know damn well that when a man tells a woman she is attractive, unless he is her partner, then the chances are he’s not saying it out of friendship, he’s not treating her as an equal, he is putting her in her place by reminding her that looking attractive to men is her primary purpose for existing on this planet. He is belittling her. It’s all on a spectrum, with groping and sexual propositioning at one end, and casually assuming that it’s a woman’s job to pour the tea at a meeting (as happened to me once) or do the photocopying, while a whole roomful of more junior men don’t even move a muscle.  
And before you bring it up, no – the fact that I am a Lesbian does not play any part in my failure to be flattered by your so-called compliment. It’s because I recognize your remark as the thinly disguised sneer that it is.
You, as a man, are NOT permitted to set the terms of this debate, any more than I, as a white person, am entitled to do so in a debate about racism.  The woman who twittered her riposte to a senior colleague who ‘complimented’ her on her profile pic, had about 400 responses within 24 hours, from women describing their own experiences. After being viral for a few days I assume there have been millions such. Every woman, even in our equal-rights society, has had similar experiences. It is not YOUR place to challenge this, and we don’t want to hear you whining about how none of us can take a compliment, or a joke.
Surprisingly enough, we can tell when we are being respected – and when we are being put down. It’s called emotional intelligence. Most women have to numb and blind themselves to this kind of behaviour, just to get through life. The ones who are prepared to take the risk and speak out are just the tiniest tip of a colossal iceberg.  And we should all be grateful to them – even men.



Saturday 5 September 2015

Refugees and slim slow slider

I sit here, caring for my Mother in her final days, or weeks, sometimes with tears but mostly just accepting.  My dreams are full of the clamour of people desperate to get away from war, struggling to live, just live.  

This poem came:

5th Sept 2015

Crowding people flee for their lives,
And end up dead on beaches.
Mother waits quietly to die, but
Her wasted body still keeps breathing.



And another:

Slim, slow.

Her bed-time chat is
Who should have
This and that
After she’s gone.

Panting, she slowly
Rubs cream into
Her hands
Before she sleeps.

Slim slow slider
You know you
Gonna die.
But here a while.

We spin slowly, a
Single leaf caught
In an eddy.
Never arriving.




Thursday 13 August 2015

To the naughty step for anyone who thinks a left-winger could win



Ok- are you listening now? People in this country won’t vote left-wing. We know this. It’s a given fact. We’ve been told it for years and don’t listen to any of those Scottish people who said they voted SNP because they liked their anti-austerity programme. Why should what people SAY about their reasons for voting be in any way relevant? We know, and they don’t. Got it? Milliband was left-wing and nobody voted for him. So that proves it, end of discussion.
But wait! Didn’t thousands of people say they didn’t vote for Ed because they thought he was Tory-lite? Doesn’t that suggest they might have voted for a left-wing candidate, if they’d been offered one?
No!! Because people in the Labour Party knew he was left-wing, even if no-one else did, and he lost, so shut up and let us get on with deciding which Blairite we want to lead the party now.  No-one in the LP wants a leftist leader, so even if one did get in, the LP itself wouldn’t support it.
But, hang on! Didn’t a majority of local Labour party branches (or whatever they’re called) support Ed against his brother because they knew he was more left-wing? So they supported a left-winger. 
For god’s sake, don’t be so silly! Ed was left-wing, he lost the election, end of.
But WE didn’t know he was left-wing.
Shut up! No left-winger will ever win an election – geddit? What’s wrong with you, aren’t you listening?
Yes, but –
SHUT UP!  OK- where was I? O dear! We’ve just had tens of thousands of people joining the LP because some weird, loony left-winger put his hand up to be leader of the party.  Well – that just proves it! No real LP member or supporter would EVER, EVER support a left-winger.
But didn’t quite a lot of them vote to select Ed coz he was left wing?
I’m not going to tell you again, one more interruption and it’s the naughty step for you!  All those people who joined to vote for the loony left are BAD PEOPLE. They are what we call “entryists” – pay attention, there will be a spelling test at the end.  These people are entirely different to the people who joined to vote for that lovely Yvette or Andy or whatshername. Those people are not entryists, they are exciting new blood who share the concerns we have to do anything we can to get into power and end Tory rule.
Anything? Even running a left-wing candidate?
No! Obviously not that, stupid.
So, how do you know people won’t vote for that?   
Because they didn’t vote for Foot and Benn back in 1983, and then they did vote for Blair all those years.
So – people who weren’t even born then are going to remember that left-wing meant some upper-class academic and a guy in a donkey-jacket who looked like he should have been the archbishop of Canterbury, not Prime Minister?
Well- ok then. Young people might get all starry-eyed, but pensioners won’t vote for lefts. They’re worried about their pensions.
You mean they’ll vote for the lot that have already mucked about with their pensions?
Look! We have to reassure them a Labour government won’t do anything to their pensions.
But they already have done something to their pensions! How much worse can it get? Ok, don’t answer that one, I don’t want to know.  Hmmm, there’s only one lot of people who we really know how they’re going to vote, and that’s the lot who joined the LP to support the left-winger.
But they don’t count. They are BAD PEOPLE. Right, that’s it! Naughty step for you!  





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Thursday 6 August 2015

Another daft kids' story in (bad) verse - reading the instructions properly on writing comps.

Well, this time I did write down the correct location of a writing comp, but I thought, when it said Children's Competition, it meant to write a story for children, not for children themselves to write it. But I found my story would qualify for their 500 word flash fiction section, but somehow I don't think it'll get anywhere, as it is definitely a children s story. There is a skill in reading the details of these writing comps, and I've never been one to take in details like that - one of the problems with being too much of a right-brain thinker. But at least, at this rate, I will have enough material to produce a whole collection of bad-poetry stories for kids. All I need now is an illustrator.

The set title of the story was A Skinny Dragon:

THE SKINNY DRAGON

There was a skinny little dragon
With knobbly knees
Who loved to go and
Climb in trees.
She had lovely pink scales,
So her Mum called her Rosie,
And every day she ate
A bowl of ambrosia,
Because she was magical and that’s what you eat if you’re magical.

Her best mate was Vera,
She was purple and green,
Dragons are all different,
None are the same.
She had funny toes
And a scrinched-up nose,
She liked to play games
And was a terrible tease,
But not nearly as good as Rosie at climbing trees.

So- there was skinny Rosie up in a tree,
And Vera down below dancing with glee.
They’d just reached the age when they’d started to fly,
And off Rosie went into the sky,
Flapping her wings as hard as she could,
Gliding along into the woods.
But that wasn’t such a great idea, 
Because she was getting far from home.
Then a great gust of wind came 
and blew her along.
Out of sight.
But she landed alright.

Then she saw, something standing nearby,
Staring at her with wide-open eyes,
With only two legs and no tail,
And skin without a single scale.
The thing suddenly shouted really loud 
“Have at you, fiend!”
It was really scary 
and made Rosie scream.
She grabbed the …. thing ..  and looked around,
“Wh- where?” she stuttered, What’s a fiend? What’s that pointy thing in your hand? Why are you looking at me like that?”

And the boy – coz that’s what he was – said
“Why, you’re just skinny and pink, with knobbly knees,
You’re almost small enough for me to squeeze!”
Then Vera came crashing down through the trees,
And landed with a loud, purple thump
And, rubbing her bum, coz she’d got quite a bump,
Stared at the boy, who stared back at her.

And Rosie yelled “There’s a monster here!
He said it’s called a fiend!”
And the boy stamped his foot and screamed 
“No! YOU’RE the monsters, 
Though you’re pink and skinny and purple and green,
“I’ve come to rescue a princess, and it’s all gone wrong,
“I’ll never be a hero, I may as well go home.”
“A PRINCESS?!” the dragons yelled, with great big grins,
BUT
“You don’t look like a princess’s pal, 
You’re brown with no scales 
and you’ve got no tail 
and WE’VE been flying for almost a week
and YOU haven’t even got wings.”

“Well, I thought dragons ate princesses for tea,
“And if I rescued one, then a hero I’d be,
“I got a sword and went to explore,
“But I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“But, if we met a princess we’d be ever so polite,
And we’d never, ever eat one, we’d be nice.”

So, they took the boy home and gave him some ambrosia till he’d cheered up, then they sent him home and went to look for a princess instead.  But ever after that the boy was always a little bit magical, because the dragons didn’t know you shouldn’t give ambrosia to humans.


Sunday 2 August 2015

New poem about osteoporosis

Slipping Out
I didn’t know it’d be like this,
Her breath cut in half,
The slowly collapsing
Basket of her ribs
So undramatically removing
Itself from her life.
“Silence is golden,” her mother said, “Girls should be seen and not heard.” Well, there’s no silence now in that grinding struggle, just breathe! breathe! Sipping air in teaspoonfulls past the slithering mass of stomach, it should not be here in the chest, it sneaked in slowly through the hiatus, stealthily like a tumour, weighting the lung, cozying up to the heart. It’s almost beautiful, that mayfly wing transparency of her spine on the X-ray, vanishing quietly from her.
All those years of holding her words,
Swallowing anger and pain,
The words tail-backing in her throat,
Bracing herself not to let them tumble out.
She’s free, now, to say them.

And sometimes I hear the never-spoken truths
Slipping from her,
Fluttering upwards
From a chest that’s too small now
To hold them.


Friday 31 July 2015

Further to my reading of books on economic theory: Austerity is not just immoral- it is factually untrue.

Keynesianism arose out of an attempt to explain the Great Depression of the 1920s, an event that has so many parallels with the present-day recession. 
Most of us nowadays assume that people understood that the Depression was causally linked to the Wall Street crash that preceded it, but apparently Chicago School monetarist theory sees no such connection between these 2 events, and in fact, has no explanation at all for the crash.  This is because the Chicago school of neo-classical liberalist economics is based on a belief that markets are automatically self-correcting and stable. It has no explanation for financial crises or mass unemployment.  In fact, this school of economics believes that unemployment is a choice, and that market prices always correct themselves in accordance with laws of supply and demand, and that, when high levels of unemployment occur, the price of labour simply has to fall to its correct level, and the prices of commodities will also fall to meet the market condition of lower incomes.  This school of economics concerns itself solely with so-called supply and demand, (a concept that goes back to a medieval economist called Ricardo) and does not even take into account the behaviour of the stock market in the economy. It is based primarily on abstract numerical models which have no relation to actual reality.
Keynes, on the other hand, believed that if economics could not explain what happens in the real world, then it has no value.  All his work was an attempt to understand, predict and ultimately regulate how economies actually work in reality, not as some pure mathematical model.  He realised that the way people behave when investing on the stock market has a profound effect on the macro-economy, and makes it inherently liable to crisis and crash if left unregulated.

To look back at the Depression of the 1920s again, 2 other causes were, first a private property market that was based on market speculation, rather than actual demand for housing, which ultimately caused the building industry to implode, and take a large part of the economy down in a crash. This in turn caused people to stop spending money or investing money at all, which triggered a downward spiral in the rest of the economy, which turned into a depression.  The property market played a huge part in the present-day recession, and although it’s worked in a different way today, there are startling similarities in the triggering of the banking crash. 
Secondly, in the 20s, as in the present-day, a massive gap grew between the wealthy few and the poorer many – with the top 24,000 families in the 20s having 3 times the income of the bottom 6 million. (I believe the disparity is far greater today) This is not a moral issue- although that is also in there - it is a problem because it is bad for the economy.  The money gets directed away from the wider economy into financial speculation and conspicuous consumption – none of which actually help any economy.  Easy money on the stock market creates a momentum which is inherently liable to boom and bust.  It was therefore inevitable that there would be a major crash.  If you factor in that most of the super-wealthy are not even paying taxes to their host countries, then we can see that virtually none of their money is doing anything useful in the economy as a whole.  Monetarists tell us that these super-rich are helping to keep the economy going through the “trickle-down effect”, but most of their money is being taken out of the effective economy by being invested back into the stock market or in property, rather than doing anything useful to create jobs and wealth in society as a whole. 
Keynes pointed out that the less money people spend, the less demand there is, output falls and unemployment rises, which then causes less money to be spent, and so on, spiralling down. So we are being told that tightening our belts and creating mass unemployment is a necessary step to getting the economy back into a healthy state, when it is precisely the opposite of what is needed.  He called this ‘the paradox of thrift’.
Keynes’ argument that the best way to bring an economy out of a depression was to create public projects which would give jobs to people, has been derided in recent decades. “Spend your way out of a crisis” is one of those phrases that is spoken with a scornful curl of the lip as typical left-wing, economic mismanagement. What he actually advocated was that if key areas of the economy were in public ownership, then they would be run for the purposes for which they were created, rather than simply as a means to make a profit.  This would have a stabilizing effect on the economy and make it less liable to shocks and crashes.  Hence, public utilities and infrastructure should be in public ownership, primarily to provide specific services - railways, postal systems, gas, electricity, water etc – and secondarily, to provide employment.  They are NOT there to make a profit. Any profits are ploughed back into the business, not hived off for investment in the stock market or for paying grossly large salaries to a minority of executives. This in turn helps to protect the economy from instability. Publicly owned services are a vital part of any healthy, stable economy and selling them off to private companies not only makes important resources, like health and education, dependent on the ability to pay for them,  it brings them into the same instability–generating sphere as the private sector. It is not just morally wrong – although it is that too- it just plain bad economics. If we don’t reverse the trend to privatize everything in the public sector, the economy will become more and more unstable and the so-called recovery will continue to be an illusion for the majority of the population. 

This government is one of the most irresponsible in its management of the economy that we have had since the Famine in Ireland in the 19th century and the infamous Corn Laws. And yet they have conned everyone so successfully into accepting their childishly deluded austerity argument that even Labour felt it had to join them in that.  Just because something makes sense and feels right does not make it true. You cannot run the economy on the same principles as a household budget - the concept is childish drivel.  Austerity is not just immoral- it is factually untrue.  

Monday 27 July 2015

As part of my attempt to get better at writing poetry to prompts, a tree theme came up at a recent poetry reading in Second Life- so I decided to write a tree poem.  A poet friend of mine, John Lanyon, described how he deals with prompts, by finding what resonates in him with the subject matter, and I found that I had a dear friend who always seems like a wonderful oak tree to me. So here it is: 

Portrait

You are like an oak,
Your roots sinking deep
Through the rich darkness,
A great toe, seeking the foundations,
Flowing honeyed sunlight
Into solid rock,
A million filaments gathering
From below, to above
Where scented, bee-filled foliage
Breathes and reaches.

Somehow, at summer’s end, the light
Becomes blessed and golden
Filling your so hard-won length
With grace and strength,
Even as the musky sweetness
Of the first yellowing leaf
Drops lightly to the forest floor.



Here's another poem with a tree-sh theme, very much composed in a moment of interaction with another person during a very intense weekend workshop. not sure if it stands up out of context- but I kind of like it anyway. 

Acceptance – poem of a moment

If I allow this into my two
Open arms, to hold
Ever so lightly,
Will it become me? Or not?

Does the tree, in whose branches
The lowering sun expands
And mellows into redness,
Ever own the sun it holds?
Or does the sun’s light turn
Green and liquid in
Those sappy veins,
While the red sun looks on
Wishing it could be in there? 

Flippin' writing competitions!!!

Is it just me? 
This is the second time I've done this: I saw a writing competition and wrote something specially for it - normally I only write what comes to me and i'm hopeless at writing to prompts. But ok- I decided to try it. Then I went back to the website that I was sure had called for the submission, and bugger me! there was no such competition! Even after trawling through all the websites I've saved in my writing and competitions folder, I still couldn't find it. This time I actually wrote it down on a piece of paper by my keyboard where I write down reminders, struggled to write 2 poems on the subject of Space and Aliens for 9-13 year-olds - one I'm quite pleased with and one that is very silly but lots of fun - then, again, went back to the publisher that I'd noted as running the competition, and no sign of it!! I think my brain went to space and got lost somewhere!!!

Anywhere, out of sheer frustration I'm publishing the poems here, lol.  As they are unlikely to see the light of day anywhere else, even if I had remembered who the heck was doing that comp. 
This is the one I'm quite pleased with: 

 SPACE

The sky at night is
so
big
I don’t know how to
think
about
it.

The stars are beautiful but
they
go
on
forever,         and we’re
just
here

How can something
have
no
edges?
My head won’t
hold
it.

I’d rather feel the stars
are
angels,
Or kind ancestors, smiling
down
at
me.



And here's the silly one 

A VERY SILLY POEM ABOUT SPACE TRAVEL

When Humans set off for the planet Zog
At the other end of the Universe,
They accidentally took another bod
Along on the ride in the rocket.
A green, shiny spider with multiple eyes,
And a mark like an H on its back,
Came in, on a cargo of pies,
They’d brought for a special snack.
It made a nest in the back of a sprocket,
And started to lay lots of eggs.
And as they voyaged across billions of miles,
Lots more spiders began to grow big.
They landed on Zog and opened the doors,
And came out into sunshine and air.
A crowd of Zoggans had gathered around
To greet the arrivals and stare.
They thought the Earthlings were really smart,
Green and shiny with marks on their backs.
But when they spoke to them and tried to be friends
They didn’t get one answer back.
Other things came out of the ship,
Large and squishy with things on their heads.
They blundered about and stepped on things, then
The Earthlings began to spin webs.
“That’s very rude!” the Zoggans shouted,
“You can’t just set up in any old place!”
They buzzed and squeaked and raged and pouted,
But the Earthlings just spun webs and ate.
It was all going wrong, the Zoggans were nice,
They tried very hard to be friends,
But the Big Things trod on the Queen’s palace – twice –
And it took them ages to mend.
The Earthlings spun and ate all the food,
Their webs were draped every which way,
And though they were green and shiny and cool,
They had absolutely nothing to say.
And the Big Things had no remote controls,
No-one could switch them off.
Where they’d been walking, nothing was whole,
They broke everything, though they were squishy and soft.
The Zoggans held a meeting and got very cross,
They really wanted to be friends,
“But they keep catching food to scoff,
And their robots are just plain hopeless,” they complained.
Then they saw the Big Squishy Things
Bending right down over them,
With things on their eyes to make stuff look big,
And the Zoggans began to scream.
But one wise old Zoggan said “Hey!
‘I think we’ve been getting this wrong,
‘We thought the people were shiny and green,
‘But it’s really the Big Squishy Things!
‘We wanted them to be like us,
‘With hard outsides and multiple eyes,
‘And they’ve been doing the same to us,
And it’s been a terrible mistake.”
So all the Zoggans ran round in a rush,
And formed themselves into rows,
And as the Humans looked down at them,
They spelled out the word “HELLO.”
So the green shiny ones became cute pets
That everyone wanted to have,
And the Earthlings stopped stepping on things,
And they had a big party and were glad.