Here is the fourth poem from my new book ‘Where the streams come from’, available here.
I chose to share this one because our newspapers in the UK are full of stories of how our government has established policy and culture within the Home Office that has resulted in terrible injustice being done to immigrants who have lived in this country, in some cases, for decades. The centre of this has been talk of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ of black people of Caribbean extraction who were invited over to the UK to fill a labour shortage in the aftermath of WW2. The government seem to have created a deliberately hostile environment to all immigrants in the country in order to placate all those Brexit voices that blamed all sorts of woes on ‘the other’. It is an utterly repugnant policy, playing to the basest of racist fear- stoking it even for political advantage.
I found myself asking how all this started? Where we always like this- tribal, given to fear and loathing of the other, the outsider? Is there really no hope of how things could be different?
The poem below was written for Greenbelt Festival several years ago. The theme of the festival was ‘home’, and the poem explores a story at the beginning of the bible in the book of Genesis describing how Cain and Abel fell out. It perhaps records the point when tribalism and the ‘property’ first began to get us in to trouble.
It is possible to see these early passages of the Bible as a record of the rise of man;
from hunter-gatherer
to farmer
to accumulator
to town dweller
to city builders who raised up Babel-towers
…and eventually onward into the struggle of successive empires who rise and fall, each one with its own winners and losers. Each one making its own refugees as it clears more space for its own avarice. Read this way, the stories at the beginning of the Bible are an ancient warning of how far we might have come from what we were meant to be.
Home becomes defined not only as ‘mine’, but crucially as ‘not yours’. In this way, like Cain, we remain to the East of Eden.
A place called wandering
There is this story from the beginning of us
Of brothers who started to measure their relative success
It began with small things –
the domestic injustices, the long silences
One brother loved the wild places
The freedom of the forest – to hunt the deer and gather the low fruit
He could bear no borders
The other was a man of industry
He fenced the land
and turned the earth to fields
And the land was bountiful
His store houses were overflowing
In this he was vulnerable
Somehow these things became a wall between them –
Leading to violence
And death.
We think we were the first to ever feel
The first to dream of higher places
The first to fall
The first to scream at sharp things
The first to feel that indescribable sting
called love
The first to make music
The first to feel shame shrinking
our callow souls
The first to seek the promised land
The first to eat from the tree
Called puberty
We were not
Long before light could be conjured
by a switch
Men and women sat around fires and
dreamed of starflight
They rose high above the flat old earth
Pregnant with new possibilities
Favour rested on their fields
But every generation grows and leaves home
We make and break and forge our own magnificence
And these palaces we build need solid doors
To protect what is mine
From what you will never have
And we wander – marked like Cain
East of Eden
Sometimes it seems that you and me
Have spent forever
Looking for a way
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