This was going to be a piece about poetry. Honestly, it was. I spent Monday lunchtime in a studio in Birmingham with two other poets, recording a one-hour show that’ll go out on Brum Radio on Sunday, and I headed back to Wolverhampton on the tram full of plans to write about the wonder of the written and spoken word, and how much poetry means to me.
I got home, switched on my laptop, and saw that while I had been out, Israel had murdered two more Palestinian journalists. Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour were young men who had been reporting from within Gaza for the past seventeen months, and their deaths bring the number of journalists killed by the IDF there to over 200. In the West Bank, Hamdan Ballal, who co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, had been brutally beaten by Israeli settlers, after which he was abducted by IDF soldiers. On top of that, of course, there are the deaths of Palestinian men, women, and children whose names we never get to hear. People slaughtered when Israeli warplanes drop powerful bombs on displaced people living in tents.
I don’t know what to do in the face of such savagery. I write about it, sure. I share social media posts, for what that’s worth. I note that there’s nothing whatsoever on the BBC website about the killing of Hossam and Mohammed. I see that while our PM found time to tweet about potholes (six times!), he’s said nothing whatseover about these murders. I wonder if this is some kind of opening gambit in the game of 4-D chess his supporters claim he’ll start playing any day now, or whether he just doesn’t see Palestinian lives as having value.
I also wonder why the UK continues to fly daily spy flights over Gaza (almost half of the total number of these flights are conducted from a UK base in Cyprus). I try and imagine what conceivable reason there could be for authorising these flights and sending the information they gather to the government of Israel, a country which is resolutely committing genocide. If spy flights are possible, I ask myself, why aren’t we flying in aid, food, and medical supplies to the people of Gaza who so desperately need it? Perhaps, I think to myself, this is just another part of that 4-D game of chess played by men in suits for whom human suffering is neither here nor there, just the price that pawns must pay.
In the face of all that, I find it hard to make the case for poetry, to write about it with the enthusiasm I felt when I walked out of the studio into glorious sunshine on Monday afternoon. The world feels increasingly dystopian, and I’m not sure we’re rising to the challenge of doing anything very much about that. And god knows, we need to.
The last poem I read in Monday’s recording was one I wrote at the start of the year, when we make resolutions we hope will last, and allow ourselves to dream of a better world. I’ll share it here, because I hope it’s relevant. And then I’ll go away and wonder how we get nearer to that imagined world than the cruelty of this one.