The shock of the
vixen woke me up, called me out;
butterflied on
tarmac,
her fur still fire,
the red...
free of all this,
someone said.
Her perfect ear,
still listening.
Or perhaps the dog
fox who opened me, brought the tears;
a sacrifice, a
sacred heart laid bare.
His perfect foot,
still seeking earth,
expecting grace.
I don't know which
it was
but I do know that
we're all crushed.
I'd been thinking
about our boys, our men.
Suicides, sent to
war.
Is it all the same
to them?
Sacrificed, their
sacred hearts laid bare.
Listening to Akala,
Shakespeare in my head.
It doesn't matter
how it happens
they still wind up
dead, rotting a prison cell,
drugged up in a
psychiatric bed.
And it's greed that
holds the gun, pulls the trigger,
starts the car,
lifts the hammer, drives in the nail.
It's we who point
the finger, weave the thorns,
to crown another
son.
And a child in Gaza
loses their father to the bomb.
Suicide, a holy war?
It's all the same to
them
and Star of
Bethlehem has fallen,
flowering on the
graves of our broken men.
Chester got too
Numb,
Chris stepped into
the Black Hole Sun,
and the Arms Fair at
Docklands is still raining money.
For some. While the
children of the poor are sent to war
enslaved to die in
deserts screaming for their mum.
Women, root and rise, like vixens,
'cos there is no
justice, there's just us.
And Rhiannon isn't
stopping, Blodeuwedd has flown,
Inanna's fallen from
her throne,
the Magdalene is
named a whore, St Pega's banished to the Fen,
and the Military
Wives Choir are singing out their hearts
with missiles
falling on their men,
while, outside,
foxes are dying, and the stars are going out.
And it's greed that
holds the gun, pulls the trigger,
starts the car,
lifts the hammer, drives in the nail.
It's we who point
the finger, weave the thorns,
to crown another
son.
But he was once our
baby, called us mum.
He was once our
lover, called us hope.
He's the bullied
teenager who tells us he can cope,
tucks the knife in
his pocket before kissing us goodbye.
Is the best that we
can manage to stand and cry?
Because we need to
remember who we are;
we're the warriors
who stood up to Rome, let loose the hare,
fought
on the shores of Mona
with madness in our hair,
defied the
witch-hunts, fanned the flames,
we're the children
of the women who could not be tamed,
led the protest,
screaming “not in our name!”
We're Rosa Parks at
the front of the bus,
Dorothy Stang
speaking out for poor and land,
reading out the
Beatitudes as they raised the gun.
We're the nuns with
the dead men walking on Death Row,
building wild
chapels in the path of the access pipe,
indigenous women
shouting, “Water is Life!”
We're the
priestesses who would not back down,
Greenham Common
women holding hands around the base,
Women in Black by
the West Bank wall.
Whatever made us
think that we were small?
(Jacqueline Durban,
25th July 2017)
