Biography
Born in London -- and then travelled the world: including Leeds (as youngster); then back to London for schooling and first degree; twice in Stockport (Greater Manchester), where I am now; and twice in Leicester --- and that's excluding long forays outside the UK (Switzerland, North Africa, Ghana, France, USA and the Middle East).
Best of All Possible Worlds
He contemplated the swift dark waters of the flood tide: “Not the Thames of Dickens”, he mused, “But the Post-Imperial Thames, Distant by two world wars from that London; Separated equally from the cutthroats of the gutter And the cosiness of the bourgeois mansions By the agony of the Somme and Gallipoli, The horrors of the Blitz, The mushroom cloud of Hiroshima, The death factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Vietnam and the killing fields of Cambodia.” It is the nature of such mental catalogues That they should inevitably be incomplete: Deep in the subconscious we must file away These tokens of our time, These keywords of suffering; Of suffering inflicted, of suffering endured. What pecking order do we each involuntarily impose, On these menus of massacres and holocausts; Which bloodbaths do we individually Choose to remember, and which to forget ? Why not the Gulag, and the peasants starved into collectivisation? Why not the storm-fires of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo ? Why not the Kurds gassed at Halabja Why not the Armenian Genocide Why not Biafra, Why not the tanks of Budapest, The bombardment of Beirut ? Interminable chronologies of our time; Indeed: from 1914’s Sarajevo Via Berlin and Jerusalem We did not journey far To 1990’s Sarajevo, Vukovar and Srebrenica; From the Dublin of Easter 1916 We only reached Belfast 1992. “So we are all victims of the medium, are we: And what if in the end There were no message, only the medium; Only the manipulation, for good or for evil, With the iconic calamities of our time Flooding across our flat screens, And into our living rooms. Baghdad and Gaza Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram Ukraine and Yemen Rwanda and Sabra-Shatilla Sudan and the Congo Helmand and Kobane Kosovo and Islamic State Charlie Hebdo and Yazidis Libya and Syria . . . Each trivialised in its turn, By repetition, By over exposure, By the all-pervasive bloodshed; Until finally they lose the very property Of making our adrenalin flow, and are dumped Onto the news-room floors, To join all the other forgotten tragedies.”
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
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