ART FOR LOVE’S SAKE

“You can’t put a price on creativity but you can put a tariff on it”
Robert de Niro’s acceptance speech on receiving the Palme d’Or at Cannes a few days ago.

To Richard Wright for his “Between the world and me”

To Refaat Alareer for his “If I must die”

have you noticed
the masters of the plantation
and the segregationists
have little ability to create art
except for statues of themselves?

have you seen
how they crave
the masterpieces
they steal from us
for their museums?

have you noticed
how poetry –
the language of the soul –
is a land
they cannot take for themselves?

perhaps it is because
narcissists
and the killers of the dream
cannot feel

all they can do is
turn emotional coldness
into fact
life into stillness
change into algorithm
breath into chokehold
art into search of tariffs
and control

but
poetry
is an endless iridescent question
that disturbs –
a flying high
of the imagination’s kite
escaping the missiles
of fact
and undeterred

facts can only be mass manufactured
to suit the absence of affect
that keeps the child
unmilked of hope

those who are so crippled
that they are incapable of love
seek refuge
in fact-ifying the world

those who are so crippled
that they are afraid of love
worship fact
as the trophy of the creativity
they killed

those who are loveless
and murder the poet
have breathed in
more than their share of the world
but
cannot exhale

A GHOST INTERRUPTS THE DEBATE ON GAZA AT THE ITALIAN PARLIAMENT

first we were told
we suffered from battle fatigue
but since
we would not stop filling the streets
a new word was coined –
protest fatigue

then since
we would not stop protesting
against the atrocities in Gaza
the zionists smugly warned us
we would succumb to
atrocity fatigue

little do they understand
that our atrocity fatigue
would be
insult added to the injury
of their war crimes

we cannot love
and be human
and be numb
at the same time

the love of our kin
in Palestine
only heightens
our sensory perception
of their dying
under our country’s drones

little do the genocidal soldiers understand
that they are the ones
creating
the ghosts
who are inured against
haunting fatigue

a young girl
member of the IDF
owns up to having killed
a Palestinian child
and near demented
laughing off the trauma
says
she cannot wash her hands
of the ghostly blood

in the Italian Parliament
the fascist Prime Minister
makes a milquetoast speech
and is interrupted
by
a protestor dressed
as a ghost

the manhandled ghost
is evacuated
by suit-and-tied security
as the PM is amused and smiles
and takes a photo –
the smartphone image of the apparition
along with the whole jeering Parliament
will follow her
wherever she goes

FORCED SEVERENCE

“Psychological distance may derive from excessive wealth which enables one to live psychologically distant from the realistic processes of society or it may come through an enforced severance – through unemployment, oppression etc…- from the functional meanings of society”.

Richard Wright, Memories of My Grandmother in “The Man Who Lived Underground”.

his name is Mohamed Saleh

he came of age
in Jabalia
with a leg shattered
when he was a child
by an Israeli sniper

his mother kept applying
to take him
to Egypt for surgery
but the permit was denied
by the zionist occupier
over and over again
until it was too late
and they had to amputate

his words quietly
make us understand
that the forced severance of his body
mirrors
the violent tearing away of his land

his phantom pain
and the chronic flare-ups
of his severed nerve
are the physical translation
of his craving
for a home no longer there

today
his stump is part of his body
and he smiles
as he focuses
on what remains –
the memories of those lost
his dreams of becoming a nurse
even though he says
the inspiration
of those left behind
is still chopped off

stripped of his limb
he is
Gaza unstripped
still whole
still walking

GHOSTS WE CAN SEE

thanking Dawn Lawson, Leonard Peltier’s executive assistant, for quoting Gordon Lightfoot’s line to me: ” As long as I’m a ghost that you can see” and in the hope she will send the whole poem

for Waad

when i was a child
i wondered
where ghosts lived
in between apparitions –
today
i know they come
from imperial history repeated

the president of France
was seen to be slapped
by his wife
before descending the steps
of his white elephant of a plane
just landed in Hanoi

the micro image
of that split second aggression
went around the world

deepfake?
artificial intelligence?
russian photo doctoring?
no – a timeslip
to the colonial defeat
in Dien Bien Phu
when the French soldiers
were flown back home
humiliated

seventy one years later
the lost look on the French leader’s face
was a ghostly reflection
of the shame and disgrace
felt by those
who lost their grip
on the former colony
now visited
as a free independent country

another living ghost
from Vietnam
was resurrected and went viral
yesterday –
the photo of Pham Nuc
the little girl who stirred the world
when we all saw the iconic image
of her running
napalm burned
from the war
continued by the American successors
to the French
in coveted Vietnam

this time
in Palestine
a little sister-in-massacre,
Waad Sheik Jalil
five years of age
ran through the flames
of a school in Gaza City
bombed by the Israelis
with US complicity –
she says sitting
drone-shocked on the charred rubble :
i walked through the fire all by myself

will Waad survive
the ethnic cleansing
like Pham Nuc did?

will her searing photo
be a turning point
in the genocide?

how many more ghosts we can see
and photograph
and stream line
will have to bear testimony
and
in what People’s court?

THE HOLE IS IN THE IMAGE OF THE DARKNESS OF THEIR SOUL

the hole
is
in the image of the empire-builder’s
soul

the bars of the cage
imprison
those who built it

they can search our cells
but they cannot jump over
the walls of our dreams

they try to force out of us
the confessions
of their own crimes

they dress us
with their shadows
and
rent us out
as scarecrows

they protect the species
of a token butterfly
but enjoy watching the children of Gaza
die

and
when a western protected butterfly
goes maroon
as its ripple
crosses the ocean
to where starving children
have no nets
but still chase hope –
the predators are surprised

and
reversing the myth of King Midas –
at the touch of our liberated wings
as we fly away,
the warlords become ungilded –
mere crumbling statues with eyes petrified
turned inwards :
their inevitable destiny
caught in concrete and steel
behind the bars
of the People’s History

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

ART FOR LOVE’S SAKE | A GHOST INTERRUPTS THE DEBATE ON GAZA AT THE ITALIAN PARLIAMENT | FORCED SEVERENCE | GHOSTS WE CAN SEE | THE HOLE IS IN THE IMAGE OF THE DARKNESS OF THEIR SOUL

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright