Effigy of Keir Starmer at a protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza, by Alisdare Hickson, CCA 2.0
by Bob Beagrie
It comes like a spate in the river,
inexorable and engulfing
and its return carries the realisation
that what you always thought
was solid ground, the hard floor
you crawled on, strode on,
built your life upon, learned to mould
or carve little gods from and complained
about the dust was nothing but fenland
in-waiting for the rainy season.
All the familiar pathways swamped
and anything you can’t hold in your hand
now belongs to the colonial flood,
to the empire of sweeping currents,
where your only hope
is to commit to the moment.
You’re hung in suspended animation
thinking, there must be some mistake,
held witness to unfolding destruction –
the van balanced on the cliff’s edge
the plane about to strike the tower
the drone attack on a refugee camp
to burn alive those sheltering selves.
Before the paralysis of helplessness
you must have known the struggle
to survive against the odds, to tend a plot,
to plant a seed, to nurture growth,
to ring-fence an enclosure,
to peer into the ravenous night
from a small circle of firelight,
map a route and cast your lot, to grasp
the chance of making something manifest
and carry hope like an ember in your throat,
only to have it torn out and stamped on,
extinguished by insignia’s soldiers at checkpoints,
confiscated by enforcement officers conducting
a night raid while cameras quaff the spectacle
for the holy feed, just one small horror
within the onslaught no one will notice or believe,
as easily dismissible as a star’s shrug
of apathy for The Earth’s demise,
at most a sigh of doom-scrolled futility.
This is how we’re being programmed
to respond to atrocity – our receptors
grow anesthetized to the stimuli through
continual exposure and its subsequent denial,
the flagrant lack of consequences,
mealy-mouthed excuses, the white noise
of their justifications repeated ad infinitum,
accountability avoidance, linguistic sleight-of-hand,
blatant attempts to redraw fixed constellations,
to dress the theatre of unadulterated slaughter
of innocents as a necessary strategy of warfare –
banking on your own psychic exhaustion
and collapse in the face of naturalised cruelty
streamed onto public and personal screens,
and the soulless sneering comments.
DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS!
Do you scream? Do you rant?
Should you sign another petition, share a meme?
Express opinion, argue, critique the hidden agenda?
Fear the outcome of where we seem to be heading?
To have a hair’s breadth chance
of enduring you must learn to ride the gyre,
to become as resilient as the floodwaters
swallowing the once firm fields
and know that others throughout history
have risen from the depths, broke the surface
of dark torrents, banded in resistance
and struggled to see the world transformed.
Your pain and sorrow are the timber
with which to build an arc, to construct a vessel
to bear a miracle, rescue truth from being drowned,
to carry it as a sapling, to launch a plea of faith
upon the tumbling swells of grief,
to become tomorrow morning’s refugee.
