These poems were written during Easter 2016 whilst confined at HMP Highpoint. Four days locked up with little else to do, given staff holidays. As I remember, they did their best to get us to the gym for a couple of sessions of badminton – in my case – lifting weights for most.
The first just shows my frustration with having to listen to broadcasts about religious activities to which I not only do not subscribe but have heard every year since the age of about six, when my family acquired their first black and white television. Broadcasters churning out the same old lines – even on my belovèd Radio 3.
The second is a comment on the centenary of the Easter Rising – the broadcasting of which was actually quite interesting – with references to a famous Irish poet that I was reading at the time.
Easter Expressions (1)
More crosses to bear
Oh, that they were there!
Use of ubiquitous Latin hymns
Neither blasphemy nor jest
Their lines left out on linguistic limbs
Which culture’s crosses are best?
Witter on, wild wordy whims!
More holy than thou
Furrows they eternally plough
Remnants, rural or religious
Recollections from ages past
The royal, the rare and prestigious
Colours nailed to a manuscript’s mast
More strings to their bow
Their scribbled seeds to sow
Expressions that exasperate!
This meaningless language
Serves to exaggerate
A corruption through usage
Which belittles the great
More axes to grind
Cultural chains that bind
Minds made oblivious
To their lack of precision
Interpretation too obvious
For logical decision
The deluge of doubt impervious
Let there be more fish to fry
That we might do or die
Some creatures reason not, or so we say
This purpose of prose is to pacify
When life is taken away
No tradition can justify
The ultimate price other beings pay
More bridges to burn
And stripes to earn
Antagonistic aphorisms
Oxymoronic quotations
Relentless rhymes and rhythms
Nonsensical notations
Silly syllogisms
O, grant us salvation from Easter expressions!
Easter Expressions (2)
Think on, today, of that green isle
A century past from the Easter Rising
Through the words of that well-known writer
Though his style, now, unsurprising
A terrible beauty was born
Created during, and by, his life
Despite his origins and loves unrequited
And personal and political strife
He described the need to liberate
This nation of papists and non-believers
By the creation of a republican state
Free from foreign privilege
His verse contrasts with morality
Any nihilistic nationalism
And pleads for plurality
A portrait of poetic patriotism
Think on, of those, wherever they be
That, for any cause, have chosen to die
Whether they be innocent or guilty
In whatever graveyard they may lie
One nation’s terrorist
Is another’s freedom fighter
One country’s citizen or subject
Another’s occupier
One patriotic poet
Another tribe’s traitor
Who might become revered by all
In years, or even decades, later
Right is not exclusively on the side
That fights for our view of democracy
No truth can belong to those that lied
Nor to those that espouse hypocrisy