A close friend called me up the other day and asked me how I was doing. I answered that I had recently experienced epileptic seizures and that I thought these may be caused by stress in my life; a personal one which will remain just that, and the other which is affecting many of us - the ongoing genocide in Palestine. He kindly suggested the solution would be for me to leave London and head into the countryside to feed the ducks.
I like ducks but that’s not an option. As an elderly man I still make it to the Palestine demonstrations and am inspired that there are people there even older than me prepared to be roughed up by the forces of law and order in defence of Gaza. They are not thinking of feeding the ducks.
Michael Rosen recently said he has been trying to “find words to make the events feel less overwhelming” and hopes words can “puncture the armour that surrounds our politicians as they engineer war, starvation and mass killing.” Words, he suggests, may be able to “bring us together to help us fight the nightmare and may give people hope and strength to get up in the morning and fight on”.
So here are my words and the more powerful one from Michael Rosen
News from Gaza
News about Gaza
I'm worried that it won't hurt anymore.
I'm worried that the truth won't hurt
I'm worried that I'll read
75 people were killed today
and I will look away.
I'm worried
that pictures of a child
wandering about on their own
in the rubble of the home
they lived in
will just be a page that I turn over
or that I click off.
I'm worried
that I won't feel in my bones
that 2 years have passed
and that I won't think
that this is an age
a long, long age
for people being starved
and bombed.
I'm worried that
I'll see those words 'two years'
and think that two years
is just the time
that the cafe on the corner
has been open
and that the two worlds
of the cafe
and the massacres
can live side by side
as easily
as when a starved person
drops dead on the ground.
(The photo above is of Alice Oswald, professor of poetry at Oxford University and arrested under the Terrorism Act.)
