Haiku Hiking (cont.)
Overlook repetition
Calais allez vous
Fireworks overhead (5th Nov), the Stroud charity
Marah, organised a sleep out in Saint Lawrence churchyard in recognition of
homelessness.
The name Marah comes from the
book of Exodus – a hard place.
Twenty five years before with a
Leonard Cohenite drone in my head, I scribbled ‘Platerest Fireworks’. Platerest, near
Bucharest, was where there was a so-called orphanage: Windows with no glass,
spasmodic freezing running water, dodgy wiring and no light bulbs. On the fifth
of November a coach arrived from Cornwall and amongst the contents was a box of
bulbs.
Late afternoon on the fifth of November
Darkness was closing on tiny hands frozen
Like hatched little birds without any words
What do they know and remember?
There they remain on the fifth of November
Filaments broken in darkness unspoken
Silent as time, how they should shine
What do they know and remember?
The fifth of November, cross Europe to trail here
Mattresses, towels and a box of light bulbs
What should we give, how should we live
What do we know and remember?
The night of the fireworks, the fifth of November
Screwing the bulbs in and switching the switch on
They clapped and they cheered, lit up the tears
What did they see and remember?
The fifth of November, still glows in the embers
But beauty is candlelight silent on Christmas night
What will they see and where will they be
Where will they be in December?
At least at Platerest there was a roof. Multiply by ‘n’ re the
refugees of today.
Things link – carving stone at Marah led to
the Independence Trust above the launderette.
There a group photocopied and hand
stitched Haiku Hiking, which Stuart Butler kindly encouraged by posting on his
blog ‘Radical Stroud’ Tuesday 8am; mindful meditators sit in silence at St
Laurence Church. 9am the following week Richard Pond handed me six sides of
sheet music set to the words.
What should we give
now?
Snug in boots with felt innards, last year I trudged off to
a dentist appointment in Dursley. The boots were covered in mud when I
arrived so I left them outside. Sat in the waiting room wearing just the felt
insides, an elderly gentleman approached.
“I have not seen boots like that since I was a boy,” he said
in a broken accent. “I used to make them in Siberia. We would dip them in water
and they froze immediately with a coating of ice. They kept me alive.”
He explained he was born Polish and his parents were dead.
Alone he had crossed Europe somehow and by the end of the war he was in
Palestine where he became a British army cadet. Demobbed he came here and
married a Dursley girl.
Tuesday 5th January 2016
Down along the Downs
A rainbow trunk leads on
east
Through moss green
branches
Wednesday 6th
Sub-merged in the mist
Verging West Dean’s
wader birds
Merge in the wet lands
The Long Man looks
down
Mist lifts to see
refugees
And the Iona stone
Battle Abbey siege
Come on in said the
stone man
Don’t say we saw you.
Dover’s Castle Inn
Where Wellington
planned defeat
Fab four penned Day
Tripper
Battle of Britain
Pilots eye dope
smoking maid
‘She’s not so dumb’
Thursday 7th January
Wild Dover dawn
Day tripper beats into
the port
Spray over the bow
Dolphin guards Calais
High razor wire board
border guards
Piss into the wind
Waste landed fenced in
Bulldoze ferry
terminal
Exit demolished
Eritrean Christmas
Tree bells ring out
nourishment
Shaking their cold
hands
Armour clad riot police appeared under the road bridge at
the entrance as I made my way out of the Jungle.
“Twit, forgot the pocket Scrabble.” I turned back.
A boy, Syrian at a guess, rode by on a bike.
“Do you want to learn English?”
He nodded. I gave him the Scrabble. “It’s a game.”
The so-called Jungle is a frontier township of domed tents
huddled around the busy, muddy high street of improvised shops and kiosks. On
foot through squally showers I trudged beside high white fences topped with
coils of razor wire, round roundabouts, passed an occasional bleak factory
site, white police vans and over the railway track back to the port. Lines of
lorries thundered by. A
onetime ferry terminal was being demolished.
Signs
“sortie, depart, exit” tumbled onto the puddled sea front.
Foot passengers are
few
A fellow day tripper
asked
“So where are your
boots?”
He had also been aboard on the morning crossing from Dover.
I had muttered “Merci beaucoup”, when he helped me shoulder the rucksack over
two coats, weighed down with Iona stones, mallet, chisel, camping stove, gas,
food. On my feet paraded the felt lined, Canadian arctic boots. It was his
scarf that made me assume him to be French.
Now I was returning considerably lighter
if wetter:
“Tell me what you’ve been doing,” he enquired in a strong
Irish accent.
I tried to explain about the boots; about the carved stone
from Iona; that today is Christmas day in Ethiopia; about the church made of
timber and plastic by the Eritrean refugees and how I had shared Christmas
dinner with them. He asked interested probing questions.
“Are you with a church group?”
“No, I often go to church, but I’m here independently.” It
was my turn. “And where are you from?”
“Derry.”
“Hasn’t Derry lately been the City of Culture?” I think he
was pleased I knew that. “And you, are you a philosopher?”
“I have a degree in philosophy,” he paused, “from the Open
University. I did it when I was a prisoner, a political. I was first put away
for seven years when I was sixteen.”
It could not have been long after Bloody Sunday.
“Then I did a life stretch.” He would have known the hunger
strikes and dirty protest of the H blocks.
We went on to talk about the cruel things we do when we are
young and think we are right, both now being grandfathers. How one needs to
learn to see things from others’ perspective.
“And faith for you?” I questioned.
“There’s an intelligence to evolution,” he replied. In a word perhaps, God.
Two lads from Derry about his age were working as volunteers
with West London Cyrenians for homeless people in the late 1970s. They could
well all have been at school together.
Brian and Tommy knew they could not remain in
Derry and not be drawn into the troubles, so they left; and he stayed. The same
choice faces those in Syria, Iraq, Eritrea (cont.) Between a stone
and a hard place
Haiku Hiking (cont.)
From the Long Man to
Long Kesh
Au revoir, my friend
Friday 8th January 2016
Pilot hunched in stone
Looking up to the sun
rise
Over the Channel
Seven hours later
The western skyline
blazes
Down from the Ridgeway
Monday 11th January
Cricklade’s slipway’s
lost
In Old Father’s
overflow
Splashing old boys’
boots
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