POETRY

This poem was awarded the Guernsey Eisteddfod Trophy for Local Poetry.

In the Lady Chapel, The Town Church, St. Peter Port

Cold, stone-cold flagged floor

with traces of lettering worn to faded

washed away by the rising tide of footsteps

in this ancient church by the shore,

gently, as the incoming ocean erases

lovers’ names, sweethearts in the sand,

these gravestones were shifted from their place

and utilized in a patchwork of history,

they’re mended by their remembering,

way before world wars took our younger men,

decades before flowers were sown for their wreaths.

I lay aside all wonderings of their source,

of why they were moved and laid here,

since the precious remains of their namesakes

have long since gone into the soil,

they are all gone, all gone with time,

reclaimed by the earth that bore them,

their headstones have become our footstones,

we stand with them shoulder to shoulder, edge to edge,

for eternity to hold and prayers alone cement.

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NEW YORK

One day we will never forget is that terrible day of 9/11. My son was working in Manhattan at the time, he got caught up in the disaster as his office was next to the World Trade Centre. Miraculously he escaped but lives with the memories, and the anniversary brings to the surface just how raw and vivid those memories are. I flew over to New York to see him a few months after and he took me up to his office and described what he had experienced. Shortly after, I wrote this poem:

September 11^th 2001 New York

American flags hang dismally
like forgotten laundry slung across balconies
dirty and betrayed
A grey skin of steam
plumes by the Hudson River
It echoes the smoke in our memory
Something to fill the gap
Where the twin towers stood like brothers
proud against the skyline
mothers search for sons
There is no looking
only seeing, disbelieving 

American flags in tatters torn
like skin like someone waving at the moon
It’s so unreachable untouchable 
this enemy of life
No amount of kindness or forgiveness
seems enough

When hate itself becomes the sword
that pierces every word and thought
What can dilute the poison draught?
Who can achieve a goal in life
if death itself is the task?

Two cylinders of buildings
where people starting work 
carrying coffee, filing letters
are ignited by a spark
Death such as this
makes history itself unworthy
of the task of recording
so many lives lost senselessly

We have this hole in Manhattan to fill
It aches, it kills us still
they all belonged to us you see
now we’re loosed from it
but we don’t feel free
Our question lies uncomfortably
Why not me?
Why not me?
 

We have all been seeing the desperate plight of the people trying the leave Afghanistan. In such situations I often feel compelled to write a poem simply to capture and share something of what people are going through. So when I saw the them clinging to a plane in desperation even as it was taking off I had to write this:

Escape from Kabul
 
People
clutching the feet of the eagle
as it rises
have lost all sense of reality,
they cry out: hold fast or fall, dear hearts,
but too late
for certain death awaits in rising or falling.
Weakness in fingers, wrists, arms,
reflects a broader weakness in humanity,
in leadership, ideologies, compassion, 
in human rights, 
 
Yet the mighty eagle soars into the sky,
into that glorious freedom nevertheless,
ignorant of the chicks beneath its wings
how they scream and plead
for the great machine to stop,
open its doors
and let them in.

This is one of the poems from my anthology of poems and drawings, Meet Me at Low Tide. (Available in paperback and ebook from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meet-Me-At-Low-Tide/dp/1532793081/ref=) The title is simply: Migrants I published this in 2015 and sadly since then, nothing much has changed to help these people. Shown less regard than a litter-bin blown over in the wind they come, migrants from Syria and West Africa, all the unwanted people spill from boats, tumble and scramble in a reckless flow of superfluous, desperate humanity. As a river overflows its banks, they flood but have nowhere to go.     An assortment of rags, paper and plastic, fluorescent life jackets, bottles and bags, curiously silent and mute they swarm. But their voices break cover on landing as they shout to each other and to those who would beat them and shoot them; this battle of chances, this army of want and need is driven like a driverless train at speed. In confusion – the flesh, the children, their bodies against fences, erupt and crumble in a rattle of steel. As a volcano flows over, they’ve come to take cover.     Small pieces, large pieces, tents and tarpaulins ugly coarse cotton, blankets and fleeces, woolen hoods, scarves, and poor little faces, brown eyes frozen like films on screens, with sights best forgotten, vivid and molten, of bleeding, of bones, of cruelty, bombs, deafening decibels ringing, just ringing. Terror pursues them, dirty and bruised, asylum rejects them, like flotsam and jetsam they come to beg shelter and we say  – go home?   Luxury cruises pass by rubber dinghies,  turn a blind eye, they’re a nuisance to tourists. Life-boats save lives but these are anomalies, bulging with orphans, old folk and families near death or dying, refugees risking all they have known for the waves, and the hunger, to find a new home. And the family man who gambled their lives for a chance to succeed, for a dream enterprise, just to live as we do, to be free and secure – must try even harder, must try or go under!     Now he weeps, now he cries, in exhausted surrender, as governments meet and discuss over banquets the outcome of war that nobody wanted and no-one foresaw and all they can say is: go home. (c) 2015 Theresa Le Flem