Recently i organised a poetry reading and barbecue at the local Occupy corner. i feel strongly at times that our society is deprived of the arts. And that we can occasionally hark back to an age when art was communal and we did not rely on 'big art' to sustain us.
The poetry bit didn't really come off, but the barbecue did.
However, i did write a poem for Occupy. There is some good poetry out there, on Occupywriters.com with contributions from famous people such as Lemony Snicket and Ursula Le Guin. There are great poems about tear gas and Tahrir Square and the activism of ages.
Mine turned out to be this:
A GUIDE TO PROTEST FOR THE OLDER WOMAN
If you've lived to my age you probably have a history of protest,
one way or another,
you were there for it.
Small spirit sparks
light lives
measured out in days and days and days
and the days present themselves to us,
and we live them.
And you know
In the deepest ocean trenches
tiny bright scarlet creatures
live and move in darkness
And you know
Under the loamy earth, in rhe blank rock
the shimmering labradorite
iridesces in darkness
Yes
A small spirit spark of it.
Protest is easy by the time you get to my age.
It's just saying yes in the darkness.
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