Night Music: Birdland

Today’s Kitchen Dilemma

 

Where to start?

A Sign Of My Times

Sixty years ago at Easter, my father dressed me in a warm coat and, with my grandfather — they were both Labour Party activists — walked me the short block to Chiswick High Street. There, we joined thousands of the curious to watch go by the first Ban The Bomb March from Trafalgar Square in central London to the Aldermaston nuclear weapons factory. Some in the crowd cheered, most watched in silence. My father and grandfather cheered and clapped and I cheered and clapped along with them.

This Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was a very new animal on our streets. A new Campaign needed a new symbol, and it was for this very march that Gerald Holtom devised the famous “peace sign”. He took the semaphore signals for “N”uclear and “D”isarmament and put them in a circle to represent the earth. And I was there at its public birth. If only my memory were sharper!

Poem (Lo)ve

 

ecce homo

this Jew ex machina

who’s purloined Pauline

aphorisms

crashed the Whore

of Babylon’s machinery

 

— a sudden stoppage

in the

constant(ine) gears

which had weathered

the (st)orms

of barbarism and buffoonery —

 

died on a tree

say it

(s)aint so

devoid of (e)motion

qui(e)t, silent even

as the public gawked

and prodded

pierced

b(lo)ody hands agape.

Agape! he cries,

Love!

through the tears

renting his b(lo)ody flesh

almost as ba(l)dly

as we have

rented his b(lo)ody

super(ficial) image

through the years

perpl(ex)ed

(conf)used

gored

in the

par(ox)ysm of death

he begged

his go(o)d forgive

those who

(k)illed him

with their fears