Bangladesh Crisis: Primark Ethical Trading.

On April 24th a garments factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed. This was the worst industrial incident since India, 1984. The Bangladeshi death toll has reached roughly 1050 making it the worst industrial accident to date. The building was declared unsafe and the police force urged managers of the building to send their staff home. A bank firm listened to the police and closed business for the foreseeable future, the managers of the garments factories sent their workers into the building. It collapsed 2 hours later. These garments go to large firms such as New Look, Matalan and Primark. This is tragic, and quite frankly disgusting. These lives matter, these people matter. The clothes do not matter.

Digging

Quite some time ago now I sent one of my best friends a poem, the same friend I send most of my writing to, and he asked me ‘where do you get it from?‘ And to me, the answer seemed really simple. That, actually, I don’t look too far for them because I always feel like they find me. And if they don’t, then I certainly don’t look very far for them. Ideas are everywhere. Literally. I’ve had ideas come to me from the way a crack formed in a pavement, from an old lady dropping something in the street, from memories that have been with me for years. I actually answered him with a poem, it seemed apt at the time, now it seems quite cheesy. I haven’t posted said poem onto this blog but I might do that sometime soon. It was basically me just telling him that poems are anywhere and everywhere. Sea, sky, bluebells, eyes, lungs. Always inside yourself. But lately, I’ve been thinking about his question more, and I’ve been thinking about it because I’ve had a prolonged period of what can only be described as writer’s block. Only this phrase is complicated because I don’t see myself as a writer, I’m just someone who writes. There’s a difference in my opinion. So I started thinking about how I turn memories into poems, and how I even go about finding a memory to write about. Then I thought I would just write my response, and when I improvise like that they never rhyme. So, to answer my friend’s question in a different way, this is how I get it and this is where I get it from:

Digging

How do you find the words?

You ask me. “Let me tell you,” I say.

“You dig and you scrape and you crawl,

Through layers of skin, through organs.

Through the memories, through the lost.

You dig it back up until it hurts you all over again,

Til the vowels in the sweet songs scrape the

Back of your throat like the razors left lying on the

Soap-sodded sink. You peel back your flesh until

You can remove every trace that was ever left

Inside you. And then you place the flap of skin back,

So that only you are left. Jagged scarring, but not

As heavy as before. By removing part of yourself

You are actually filling the gap. The hollow echoes that

Have pulsed through you for far too long escape like a sigh.

You dig until you find the pain, and then you write it,

And change it, and cry over it. Then you may laugh at it

And delete it. Add to it or take parts away that don’t leave the

Desired effect, not wanting to tarnish the paper like you

Yourself have been tarnished.

You dig until you are buried deep in bruises and

Love letters, old text messages and photographs.

You dig until you are back into the debt and are kicking

Your way through the tears, maybe yours but maybe his.

You dig until you are feeling your way through bed sheets

And darkness. Your fingernails disappear, and your hands are chest

Deep, pulling out the emotions you locked away.

You dig until you find what hurts.

The words have always been there, waiting to be found.

It’s never been a question of having to find the words. They cling

To you like dew clings to cobwebs. They lay under

Your pillow and collect in the corner of your mirror.

They are written on your body, in the ink only

Your eyes can see. They’ve grown too comfortable

In the back of your throat. The words have always been

There. Waiting to harm you, free you, rescue, end you.”

“What you need to ask,”

I say,

“is how do you find yourself?

Let me tell you,

You dig until you find what hurts.

You scrape it into paper, make letters dance

With each other until the sentences are true enough.

You end it once and for all with a full stop. Period.

Never a colon that can be added to.

And once you’ve matched the hurt to the waiting words,

You dig yourself right back out,

Towards the sunlight, that you notice for

What feels like the very the first time.”

 

Feathers

There’s a gentle beauty in the fragility of feathers.

How easy it is to break them:

Like spines and like trust.

There’s a transparent lightness in the weight of feathers.

How easily they are swept from their resting place:

Like innocents and like shy girls.

Believe it or not, feathers have characters.

Just like you, just like me.

Some look as strong as the sails that manned

The boats that found the Americas.

And some look as withered as spinsters,

Who’ve grown tired of living their life abandoned,

Bent-backed crooked and wisdom filled.

The unique jagged ridging that form their side.

How the side of one feather could fit into another:

Like hands and like locks, that sit atop a French river.

Like stanzas or couplets, or lips and legs.

There’s a beautiful solitude in the space around a feather.

How it dominates the space quite perfectly.

And no one realises, that actually,

It used to be a part of something so much bigger.

Great-Grandparents

Wrote this morning. The first time I’ve tried to write a poem without it rhyming, I’m actually not too sure if it is even a poem. Anyhow, my little nanna is one of my favourite people in the world, I can barely even put it into words. She’s really ill, it’s back to the days of holding our breath and just waiting. I never met my great-grandfather, he died just before my older brother was born. My great-nanna and him were watching a movie, and he died laughing at it. Quite literally. 

She never thought a laugh could have stolen her love.

But it did. Gut-wrenching, doubled over, keeled over,

fallen over. Gone. All that was left of him was the percussive

echoes of whatever he had found so funny. The movie still playing

in the background, long after the wheezing and screaming had left the room.

He looked asleep, more peaceful than he ever looked at 1am beside her.

Never afraid to fall too deep but they both had bombs to build and children to hide.

Heather to cry over. Her one comfort as he lay there was knowing that Heather  wouldn’t be

so alone anymore. The hands that held her would now hold their stolen young, and when you

arrived you would all hold each other. Just like old times. Before bombs fell, and the cinema tickets

went up in price. Before you died laughing through the movies.

 

She lies there almost transparent atop the white. Twenty five years of twisting the

ring around  her finger. Remembering how his voice sounded, but never the laugh.

Ninety two birthdays had been and gone, nothing in the world surprised her.

Don’t call the ambulance. The hospital ceiling was the last thing she really wanted to look at,

but they needed her to hold on. I need you to hold on. She’s tired, and home is no

longer where she goes to sleep. Home is where she no longer wakes, and they just won’t let

her leave. Return to where it was before she opened her eyes for the first time.

She hears them, their tears disturbing the neat folds in the cold cotton. Their words

getting lost at the back of their throat. She’s heard it all before. Ninety two years,

her love stolen by laughter, a pleasant smother,

and all she really wants is her mother.

 

 

 

 

Bare Branches

This is something I wrote yesterday, the first piece of prose I’ve wrote in a little while…

I always believed that bare trees were the most beautiful kind of trees. Trees that had once been excessive and green, that had life in abundance and had been graceful in their stripping. The trees that had known exactly what they had lost because it was exactly the same as what they were yet to gain. I always imagined that the dew of a misty morning that hung onto their bark was actually their tears. A tear of loss and a tear of rejoice. They had held their leaves like children for the full summer, but the ground grows cold in Autumn and it has to get its blankets from somewhere. All the bare trees were happy to do that. To share, to warm and to watch as their young were trodden and trampled. Bare trees that stretched their arms towards the sky, their fingers almost stroking the clouds. Bare trees that nobody noticed because they were just that, bare. Unnoticed, like mothers who had lost their children. Childless mothers. Leave-less trees.

But what about people? The bare trees might be the saddest of all trees. Their bare, upward branches might be clawing the sky to pieces for allowing the wind to turn cold, and the tarmac to grow cold and their leaves to leave, to warm something so far below them. The tears of willow, the oldest tree of all, they don’t call her weepy for nothing. She is in mourning, stooped over bent-backed. Silenced. The tears are silent and the bark is silent and the branches have lost everything they once nurtured so tenderly. The only sound to rouse the emptiness is the sound of their young, falling to their final resting place amongst the shivering blades. We can map any novel onto a tree. We could even make it a demon in the dark, if we wished. So what about people? Those souls floating on the edge and biting their lip just waiting to be asked to dance. What about the people who are shells? Filled with stories and magic, but only heard when you allow them to feel your ear and when you allow your ear to feel them. What about all the people who hide behind book covers and false smiles. Do we map our stories onto those, too? Are they heroes and villains? Damsels or witches? Sometimes, it is a good thing, that we map our stories onto the people too scared to share their own, like the trees who can’t speak for themselves. The truth is; we have to put our magic onto people because, for whatever reason, they’ll never reveal their own.

A long overdue update

An update on all things MA, poetry and personal.

If you can’t see it, then it must not be there? Mental Illness.

Today, my mam found out she was no longer eligible to receive money for her sickness. Let me tell you about my mam. She’s mentally ill, I’m her carer. I don’t have to feed her, I don’t have to carry her around, I don’t have to bath her. I do have to drive her to see a psychiatrist every week, sometimes twice a week. I do have to make sure that she is taking her medication. I have to be her emotional support and I have to make her see that life is still worth living.

 

She is a single parent raising a 12 year old. She works ten hours a week at a school which she volunteered at for 23 years before she received payment for her work. She does this under occupational therapy, the school is her comfort zone and she is only able to work there because she is so familiar with it and the staff know of her problems. 

She can’t get on public transport, she can’t go anywhere alone, she can’t go to sleep because of her insomnia, she can’t remember many of her appointments, she tells me several times most days that she wishes she wasn’t here. That she wishes she could go to bed and not wake up. 

She can sense when something bad is going to happen. She can cook a meal for 13 people at 2.30 am. She can make just about anything through arts and crafts. She can draw Pete’s Dragon. She can make me feel like the most loved person in the world.

She worries about everything. She worries that I might get hurt whilst walking my 6 minute walk to the metro station. She worries that she hasn’t made enough food for any given meal (there’s only 3 of us and she cooks for 13), she worries that she might have offended a child by correcting them, she worries that we are going to run out of money. Every day, every hour, she worries about money. And most of all, she worries that one day she will listen to the voices in her head.

My mam is mentally ill with suicidal tendencies. 

Today she found out she is no longer eligible to receive money for her illness. Apparently being suicidal with severe mental problems is not actually an illness. Apparently, depression is not an illness. Apparently, wanting to die is normal.

My mam is going to worry about money everyday. £400 to help raise my little brother, pay for the gas and electric, pay for the petrol to her appointments. This money will go to drug addicts, alcoholics, people who claim they can’t work but accept any cash-in-hand job they can find and a small amount of genuine people who have been lucky enough to keep it.

Thank you, government.  You have just made my job as a carer and as a daughter harder than I ever imagined.