Category: poetry

Pandemic

David Herbert3 Comments

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath –
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise the world your love –
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we shall all live.

Lynn wrote this on March 11th in the early days of the pandemic. It immediately made an impact, going viral on social media. I am grateful for the suggestion that this is a special time and I am sure that a lot of us have experienced it as that.

Mind you, it has been easy for us. We have a house and garden. We have a nice daily walk in woodland, we are not home schooling children. We are not worried about unemployment. There are just two of us and we have enjoyed each other’s company. Not everyone is so lucky.

In these special times we have discovered who counts to us. It is those who are on the front line – those we clap every Thursday evening – those who at other times we have taken for granted and whose gifts we have devalued. This is a sacred time. This is a scared time we live through with compassion.

You can read more of Lynn’s poetry, and purchase her book, Bread and Other Miracles, at lynnungar.com. The poem is reproduced here with Lynn’s permission. Thank you Lynn.

Remember Christina Rosetti

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Christina Rossetti 2
Portrait of Christina Rosetti by her
brother Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1866)

We celebrate the life of Christina Rosetti on April 27th every year. This is the anniversary of her first recorded verses (1842) – addressed to her mother. There is a neat conjunction with this celebration and the reading appointed for Morning Prayer – the birth narrative with which Luke begins his gospel.

Christina was the youngest of four children in a very gifted family. She is considered to be one of the finest Victorian poets. One of her poems is treasured by Christians and sung to celebrate Christmas.

The opportunity to give thanks for Christina, and is also opportunity to marvel that a “splash of words” (h/t Mark Oakley and Louis MacNiece) are able to breathe meaning into life and marvel at the one Word which breathed life into meaning. Here is the poem we sing:

In the bleak midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Two poems for which she is particularly remembered for are Goblin Market and Remember.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the distant land:
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me: you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve;
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rosetti’s work is in the public domain, as is the work of her brother, Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

Small Kindnesses – where holiness dwells

David Herbert1 Comment

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die” we are saying.
and sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder
and for the driver of the red pick up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only those brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here
have my seat.” “Go ahead – you first.” “I like your hat.”

This is a poem by Danusha Laméris from her first collection, The Moons of August which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Naomi Shihab Nye has also written a remarkable poem on Kindness.

I like the language of kindness, of kith and kin, that in German children are kinder, that kindness is the making of humankind and that humankind should be qualified by kindness. By themselves small kindnesses are rarely remarkable in the sense that they are newsworthy, but they make our days and open the door to the greater kindnesses of friendship and community. Small kindnesses are usually intuitive, born by habits of the heart grown in rich cultures of difference and longing. In one place the bus stop is a silent waiting room of isolation, in another, like Glasgow, it’s a meeting place. Why the difference? What are the differences in the habits of the heart of both places?

Danusha Laméris asks the question, what if these small kindnesses are the true dwelling of the heart? Should we be surprised when everything about the kingdom of god is small? In two tiny parables Jesus explains the kingdom of God. “He said, ‘What is the kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in a garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.’ And again he said, ‘to what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” (Luke 13:18-20)

So in a simple touch, a smile, a whisper or a word might be folded the holy – just a single seed planted in our lives. There probably isn’t anywhere else for the holy to dwell.

North Star Fading – a poem to watch for Refugee Week

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During Refugee Week I have been posting a poem a day. Today’s poem is one to watch. It highlights misleading promises, extreme dangers and dashed hopes than many refugees have to face.

Please click the image to see and hear North Star Fading – a zoom comic from PositiveNegatives who tell true stories drawn from life – this from the lives of Eritrean refugees.

Karrie Fransman did the visuals and Lula Mebrahtu was responsible for the words and sound. Interviewed about the work Karrie explained “I’m Jewish and my grandfather was a political refugee. Our festival Passover commemorates our history as refugees, so there is a personal link.”

Lula has this to say. “My own experiences play a big role when I am creating. I remember a few years back, I watched a news report about a ship that had caught on fire and sunk near the border of Italy. A lot of ‘illegal immigrants’ onboard died. There were no names, pictures or interviews with those who survived, just factual news, and the narrative was focused on the immigration crises. That same day, my mother got a phone call. It transpired that a family friend had a son on that ship, and he died. His mother didn’t even know he made the voyage. My mother had to break the news to her.”

There is more from their interview at https://www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/north-star-fading/

Some poems I have posted for Refugee Week are shown below this post.

The British – and our refugee stock

David Herbert2 Comments

Benjaminzephaniahcamff (cropped)

Benjamin Zephaniah describes himself as a “Rasta Folkie”. He’s a well known British poet who plays the part of Jeremiah Jesus in Peaky Blinders (I love Peaky Blinders!). He comes from Wandsworth, Birmingham, which he describes as the “Jamaican capital of Europe”.

I am posting a poem a day for Refugee Week. This poem is called The British and is about what makes us tasty. I am from Leicester which has a long tradition of welcoming refugees (as in this welcome the city gave to Basque refugees in 1937). But even there, I remember signs in pub windows in the late 50’s and early 60’s which said “no blacks, no gypsies, no Irish”. Little did they know, and little did they understand that they were from a long standing melting pot with some good, hearty refugee stock.

Here’s the recipe:

The British

Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.
Remove the Romans after approximately 400 years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously.


Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.
Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat.
Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians,
Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with some
Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese
And Palestinians
Then add to the melting pot.
Leave the ingredients to simmer.
As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.
Allow time to be cool.
Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy.

Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.

Hungry Chair – a fourth poem for Refugee Week

David Herbert3 Comments

Hungry Chair is my fourth poem to mark Refugee Week – picking up the “chair” theme of inclusion from Nicola Davies’s poem I posted yesterday, The Day the War Came. A common response to the refugee crisis is “there isn’t any room” – sometimes there is an apology about it, but usually not. Once in a while someone will make room in their home, school or community. Hungry Chair, like The Day the War Came, is a poem which thanks and praises those who do make room.

Denel Kessler is the author of Hungry Chair. The principal she refers to is Maha Salim Al-Ashgar, Principal of Khawla Bint Tha’alba Elementary School for Girls, Jordan. The poem is a “thank you for showing the world what compassionate action looks like”. The Principal’s action challenges my lack of compassion. The video is well worth watching.

Hungry Chair

Let’s talk about heroes
the everyday kind
a Jordanian principal
at a school for girls
offering a simple solution
rather than slamming the door
in the faces of children
who have done nothing
to create the war
forcing the families to flee
or die in the hateful dust
clouding the world’s vision

the school is overcrowded
but when Syrian mothers beg
for their children to be taught
instead of saying     no room
the principal asks each girl
to bring a chair and she will
find room for one more
students walk to school
carrying multi-hued chairs
so many eager daughters
classrooms full beyond bursting
but the principal keeps her promise
none are turned away

a loving heart refusing
to be the lock on the gate
offering instead a key
a  mother’s simple wish
for her daughter to write her own name
becoming “maybe she will be a doctor”
a seven-year-old girl declaring
“I want to be smart”
the world begins anew
with open arms, willing minds
perched on the edge
of bright plastic chairs
asking only teach me

I am hungry to learn

I found The Hungry Chair here

What poem would you choose for Refugee Week?

The Day War Came – another poem for Refugee Week

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I am posting a poem a day during Refugee Week. I have already posted Home by Warsan Shire and My Hazara People by Shukria Rezaei.

The Day War Came was written by Nicola Davies in 2016 when she heard that the British government was refusing to allow lone refugee children entry into the UK. Nicola Davies is a children’s author and zoologist. The poem has been published as a book with illustrations by Rebecca Cobb.

it is striking how many of these poems I have selected for Refugee Week are about children. Here the child’s safe space is undermined in a split second: the place where they belonged becomes lost to them and they have no choice other than to go on the run.

One person responded to this poem by drawing a chair – I suppose there is a real welcome in our phrase “draw up a chair”. That idea grew into parading #3000chairs across the internet for 3000 child refugees alone and fleeing “all kinds of ghastliness” to “make the people who voted to shrug their shoulders and throw those kids to the traffickers hang their heads in shame”. Posting this is my offer of a chair – but as well I asked Vincent to draw one up for me as my way of saying “refugees welcome”.

The day war came

The day war came there were flowers on the windowsill
and my father sang my baby brother back to sleep.
My mother made my breakfast, kissed my nose
and walked with me to school.

That morning I learned about volcanos,
I sang a song about how tadpoles turn at last to frogs
I made a picture of myself with wings.

Then just after lunch,
while I watched a cloud shaped like a dolphin,
war came.
At first, just like a spattering of hail
a voice of thunder …
then all smoke and fire and noise, that I didn’t understand.

It came across the playground.
It came into my teacher’s face.
It brought the roof down.
and turned my town to rubble.

I can’t say the words that tell you
about the blackened hole that has been my home.

All I can say is this:

war took everything

war took everyone

I was ragged, bloody, all alone.

I ran. Rode on the back of trucks, in buses;
walked over fields and roads and mountains,
in the cold, the mud and the rain;
on a boat that leaked and almost sank
and up a beach where babies lay face down in the sand.

I ran until I couldn’t run
until I reached a row of huts
and found a corner with a dirty blanket
and a door that rattled in the wind.

But war had followed me.
It was underneath my skin,
behind my eyes,
and in my dreams.
It had taken possession of my heart.

I walked and walked to try and drive war out of myself,
to try and find a place it hadn’t reached.
But war was in the way that doors shut when I came down the street.
It was in the way the people didn’t smile and turned away.

I came to a school.
I looked in through the window.
They were learning all about volcanos
And drawing birds and singing.

I went inside. My footsteps echoed in the hall.
I pushed the door and faces turned towards me
but the teacher didn’t smile.
She said there is no room for you,
you see there is no chair for you to sit on,
you have to go away.

And then I understood that war had got here too.

I turned around and went back to the hut, the corner and the blanket
and crawled inside.
It seemed that war had taken all the world and all the people in it.

The door banged.
I thought it was the wind.
But a child’s voice spoke.
“I brought you this,” she said, “so you can come to school”.
It was a chair.
A chair for me to sit on and learn about volcanos, frogs and singing
And drive the war out of my heart.

She smiled and said:
“My friends have brought theirs too, so all the children here can come to school.”

Out of every hut a child came and we walked together
on a road all lined with chairs,
pushing back the war with every step.

Nicola Davies

van-gogh-chair-1888-89-the-chair-and-the-pipe-6252763

My Hazara People – a poem by Shukria Rezaei (15)

David Herbert6 Comments

shukria-rezaei

The theme of Refugee Week 2019 is You, me, and those who came before. It is an invitation to explore the lives of refugees, and those who have welcomed them – throughout the generations.

I’m observing Refugee Week with a poem a day. This poem highlights the horrors faced by children – such horrors and distress that they can’t find the words to describe what has happened to them. This poem, brought to our attention by Kate Clanchy, is by Shukria Rezaei (pictured right) who “can’t write” about her Hazara people – she just can’t find the words. I read her poem side by side this report on the growing outrage over the separation of children from their parents at the southern US border.

Shukria’s Hazara people have been persecuted for centuries. They settled in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century but for much of that time have lived on the edge of economic survival, being driven from their land and being sold as slaves. They are Shi’a and have been persecuted by the majority Sunni population. The Taliban declared jihad on the Hazaras when they seized power in 1996.

This is the first poem Shukria wrote when she came to the UK aged 15.

I can’t write about my Hazara people
who have suffered for decades
in Afghanistan where they come from
in Pakistan where they are murdered
in Iran where they offend
because of their almond-shaped eyes
my mind is blank!

I can’t write about how loud the shooting was
just two miles from my house.
How my aunt fainted.
How nervous my mom got,
how the cup fell from her hand.

I can’t write about how innocent people died,
how the Martyr’s necropolis gets bigger and bigger,
how my people suffer,
how cruel this world can get,
how frightening it is

for kids like me.

Shukria Rezaei (15)

Home – by Warsan Shire – a poem for Refugee Week

David Herbert8 Comments

The 20th Refugee Week begins on June 17th, with a look at #generations. The theme of Refugee Week 2019 is You, me, and those who came before. It is an invitation to explore the lives of refugees, and those who have welcomed them – throughout the generations.

I suppose there is an air of helplessness and resentment in those who don’t regard themselves as refugees. I share the sense of helplessness. But then I remember our own family story of a woman crossing the border in a boot of a car having past her baby to an unknown woman to cross separately. That woman never knew whether she would be reunited with her baby. Fortunately they were reunited. Without that baby our family would be incomplete and a generation of students would be missing out on a compassionate and art teacher.

This poem by Warsan Shire explores the terrifying circumstances which force people to flee for their lives. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. “You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well”. Warsan Shire (born 1988) is a fine British poet, born to Somali parents in Kenya. Here is her poem, Home:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Rags – a poem by Caroline Bird

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This poem by young British poet and playwright Caroline Bird has more than a whiff of Pentecost about it. Caroline Bird was born in 1986. Already she has had five collections of poetry published. This poem is from her latest collection In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, 2017).

Rags

When love comes through
the vents, you press wet rags against
the grill, lest you are smoked out
of your loneliness, you tape egg boxes
to your ears so you can’t hear
the hissing, you swathe yourself
in shame like vinegar
and brown paper. At sundown,
you gather up the rags
and press them to your face
like the dress of a lover, hoping for
a slight effect, the remnants of a rush –
not enough to change your mind – just
enough to pacify the night.

Yes, I’ve done all that. And now I am full of questions.

How do we make the most of love?
How do we make the most of every minute of love?
What do we do about our preoccupations and those things which make us unprepared for love?
How dare we hope for love and remain openminded to recognise love?
How do we avoid leaving it all too late?
How can we let love do her work in us and through us?