I’ve been trying to find the words to articulate – to myself as much as anyone – why it is I feel so tired at the moment. Although ‘tired’ doesn’t really do it justice. Bone-weary might be nearer the mark. Soul-weary even nearer. It’s been nagging at me for weeks, for months, and this is as good an explanation as I can manage.
Cognitive dissonance is exhausting. Maintaining the facade that life is business as usual – while we ignore the genocide happening in one place, the wars in others, the climate crisis happening everywhere – is utterly exhausting. Watching so many people positively revel in their hatred of immigrants and refugees – choosing to proclaim it as loudly and proudly as they can – is utterly exhausting. Seeing politicians collude in all this – while our media fail, in any way, to hold them to account – is utterly exhausting. And it surely isn’t sustainable. For anyone.
Then there’s the sense of powerlessness. I log onto Twitter and there are videos of children whose bodies have been shredded by bombs, and I know the governments which provide those weapons are doing nothing to prevent it, that they mouth platitudes about ceasefires and two-state solutions while giving free rein to a murderous regime, that they could stop it tomorrow but choose not to.
I don’t have a solution to any of this – I’m just a poet. But I will keep raising my voice against injustice. I will keep arguing and agitating and hoping for a better way of sharing the resources our planet is awash with. We have all the information we could ever need to create a better world. We just require the political will to put it into practice.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ve been trying to put those feelings into words for a long time. And now, back to writing some poetry.
[this was published earlier today as a thread on Twitter, then added here]