My Poetry: A Neighbour's Gift

16 June 2014: Iraqi town of Tel Afar (near Yazidi heartland) falls to Isis

3 Aug 2014: ISIS storm Sinjar. Only 25,000 of 300,000 residents stay. Yazidi forced to convert to Islam

March 2015: UN accuses IS of genocide and war crimes. Citing evidence of plans to wipe out Yazidi

13 Nov 2015: town of Sinjar liberated. Yarzidi start to return. Mass graves found.

Inspired by an article in the Guardian newspaper: http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ighbours-raqqa

A user manual explains

What to do when she explodes

With rage, so her new master

Cannot complain

When she's disobedient.

Stolen as a teen,

Bought and sold

Into years of imprisonment

Forced marriage and more.

As a child she saw the injustice

Of hypnotised men corrupted by faith,

Saw sex used as a weapon of oppression

Just as white men once held the whip,

To plantation worker,

Now woman is the nigger

Of esoteric zealots

Painting middle-eastern streets,

Museums and homes

Blood red in the name of Him.

In drugged serried heaps

Sisters and mothers lay

Stacked like soup cans

On supermarket shelf,

Waiting to be sold,

Except her beauty and viginty

Make her a valuable second wife.

But the first,

Touched by a mother's sympathy

Harbouring a wife's jealousy,

Refuses to acknowledge

Foreign tribal flesh as human.

Her latest owner taunts

How brave brother and father

Succumb to sword;

Now in midst of pleas for death

She's told to ignore her desires

The girl she knew is already dead,

Because possessions

Cannot dictate their own fate.

Midnight cries turn from pain to pitiful

The slow drip of slave tears

Erode neighbour's limestone heart,

Until with a 'provision of captivity'*

A thousand dollars buys possessor

The right to beat, marry or make

Her a maid at 20-years-old.

Instead new owner

Teaches teen to read,

Then risks their lives

To smuggle this broken girl

From the grip of soldiers fist

Under abaya* and false intention

To Turkish borders,

Past guards reciting the shahadah*

And female morality police

Looking to disfigure unbelievers.

A nose stud* her passport

Back to a stolen past,

Where a mother mourns

And a sister will never return,

Where freedom is a gift

From an unknown neighbour.

*provision of captivity: a contract between men when buying and selling women

*A nose stud a symbol of being a Yazidi

*Shadadah: a statement of Islamic faith

*Abaya: a cloak like garment worn by woman in Muslim countries

My Poetry: Meditations from a bus window

I

So many things crowd me

Ideas, people, hang-ups

Until I'm too numb to see what

The movement between heaven

And the sea means.

Merchants peddle lies

Gift-wrapped as truth;

Our neighbours’ scared

To point out the fabric of our reality

Is woven from the same falsity

As the emperor’s new clothes.

Birds drift silent as shadows

Between the faint stars

And milky afternoon moon,

They know gravity is arbitrary

And landing dangerous

Once you've learnt how to fly.

The fishes swim

Elegant as a final farewell

Carving their way

Through the steel cold river,

Still as an old photograph,

The big picture

Framed in the space above them.

II

I'm st dscnnctd

Th wrld rlls pst lk

A strght to TV movie

Behnd th drty wndw.

Th yrs dispr

Lk snw

On yr tngue.

Lng ag i stppd

Cntng th mnths

each dy a lng sries of nghts

III

I watch three kids dancing

In a tatty park,

And feel sad.

I think of the kid

In the picture frame

Above my mums mantlepiece

Who had no idea he would

Turn grey and so tired,

That one day the crazyiness

Would subside like chalk cliffs

Eroding a year at a time,

Leaving nothing but a shipwreck

And an unfulfilled daydream.

The view from the bus window across the River Adur, heading into Shoreham across the A259, one cold December day 2015.

My Poetry: Notes on a Destiny, Ignored (The Fall of Icarus by Breughel)

In tired arms, a child sleeps

In crook of a widow's weeping,

Grief dressed like shadows

Hush the black room silent

Love's lasting touch remains.

But outside clouding room,

Where joy and heartache tales entwine,

The world moves a mile through space,

And because they do not know,

Men still laugh, and children play.

People move to fill the day

Do old things in new ways

Clones sell souls collecting pennies

Watch the world whirl by

Their windows,

Because they're numb to our fate.

And so nobody notices the boy

Fall from crystal blue sky,

Or see the ship which witnessed

History, but still set sail for the horizon

To fulfill its destiny anyway.

Nobody saw the boy’s feathers

Gifted by flawed prophets

Melt from his thin white arms

Just before he fell.

Were you talking to the ploughman

About reaping what you'd sowed?

Were you blinkered to history

Unfolding before you,

As you kept you head down

And miss poor Icarus, the fool,

Reaching for the sun?

His death made mourners

Of rubberneckers,

For a second a nation recoiled

Then returned to cups of tea and biscuits

Forgetting the death,

Because it did not belong to them.