Emancipation & Liberation

Savings
Efficiency ones or just savings
Public sector restraint
And reducing waste
New realities demanding
These new measures
For we all have to tighten our belts
During this down-turn

Which refuses to say
What we are all saving for
And who we all are
While we still fight wars
And order Trident Mark 2
As Lords and Ladies lunch
At the Palace or at the Club
During this down-turn

That affects us all apparently
The rich who grew rich
On the human waste they created
The lives they gambled away
In their Stock Market
And the new poor, new homeless
Along with the previous poor
And the previous homeless
Who have no belts to tighten
During this down-turn

From Dornoch we moved further north
not as north as where she was born
but north enough to understand;
to understand her returning

She sat there beneath the sculpture
Of ‘The Emigrants’ at Helmsdale,
Moved by the woman looking back
To the strath that was once her home.

For she too had to leave here
To work in service or in shops;
She too, with some eighty years now,
Lived in the south and not the north

And these years have moved her to tears
And this woman brought them all back,
Yet she sits with son and daughter
Who marvel at her dignity.

Two highland ladies, one in bronze,
And the other in flesh that pains,
Bestow upon a changing world
Unchanging values that redeem.

This is taken from Jim’s latest book of poetry, Being Beneath the Moon. Available for £2.50 including. postage & packaging from Magdalene Press, 2, Carlton Street, Edinburgh, EH4 1NJ.

Originally published in Emancipation & Liberation Issue 8, Autumn 2004.

This wall between us slowly grows
slinking along the dusty earth
like some snake in the desert sands

Once in Jericho it fell down
by those who now do the building
the heirs of the trumpet blowers

Once Belshazzar saw the writing
on the wall, Daniel read the words
Mene, mene, tekel, parsin.

The days of your kingdom will end
for your acts have been found wanting
and your kingdom is divided

Jim Aitken

They all have their stories.
This one, young and ageing,
says that his stepfather
was ‘a brutal bastard.’

And in those greying eyes
that have seen far too much
I can still sense the child
whose world went upside down.

But this lad has moved on,
now dreams of survival
on the harsh, concrete street
where he must never sleep
must never sleep
never sleep.

by Jim Aitken

Eliot said the game was up
after the First World War. How wrong!
For after the Second we fell
into a state of disbelief
that still must make us shake our heads.

And on then to Hiroshima,
To Korea down to Vietnam,
And all the other names we call-
Cambodia, Timor, Iraq.

The list a litany of grief,
and what now to say about this
except Beckett may have the words
to sum it up: ‘No matter, Try
Again, Fail again, Fail better.’

by Jim Aitken

One year on
after the wind subsided
and the floods disappeared
there was still a scene
reminiscent of some battle zone
with dilapidated houses
piles of debris lying there
upturned and rusting cars
broken boats moored in-land
amid the empty, eerie desolation

One year on
he said New Orleans will be rebuilt
acknowledging that it had not
but it would be a great city again
in some indeterminate world of time

One year on
from all of this I had read
how the empire abroad expanded
how Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad
occupying fifteen square miles
with two swimming pools
a miniature golf course, mini-theatre
planned to accommodate 20,000 soldiers

One year on
from all of this I had read
of the 234 military golf courses
around the American world
and of the Air Mobility Command
that flies servicemen and their families
in fleets of long-range C-17 Globemasters,
C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, C-19 Nightingales,
KC-135 Stratotankers and KG 10 Extenders
and for the more senior personnel there are
Learjets, Gulfstreams and Cessna Citation
luxury jets

One year on
desperate people in New Orleans
no longer look at the stars
or listen to the sounds of birds

One year on
after this neglect at home
I had heard about Camp Taji
once barracks to Saddam’s Republican Guards
how it has its own Burger King, Subway and Pizza Hut

One year on
after this neglect at home
I heard about the new Embassy Compound
in the heart of Baghdad
ten times bigger than other embassies
with its own sources of power and water

One year on
in New Orleans and several years on in Iraq
there’s still no water or power

One year on
as the poor scavenge in fear
in the rubble of New Orleans
new bases have been and are being
built
in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Kosovo,
Pakistan, India, Australia, Singapore,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Senegal,
Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone, Georgia,
Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan
and only God knows where else

One year on
if you are poor or homeless in America
you should join the military
doing their great job of extending freedom
and get a posting abroad
for that way you will get yourself a house.

by Jim Aitken

Each night last week
I have caught his eyes
pleading for
support and understanding

Daily detainees
for being himself
saying the wrong things
that he thought were right

Speaking out of turn
his essential self
expressing himself
amid hostile glares

As they shout him down
detain him further
for interfering
with assessments

The new addiction
of a sick system
screaming to be free
from doses of tasks

And of pointless tests
that control them all
mould them for the workplace
like work-house before

I think of Hegel
the dialectic
of master and slave
neither of them free

Both suffocating
from the prescription
to avoid real thought
and open windows

Some of Jim’s writings are in From the Front Line of Terror, published by the Stop the War Coalition & the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. £3 from SPSC, Peace & Justice Centre, Princes St., Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ.

by Jim Aitken

Do not call me Ishmael
or anything quite as grand
but call me instead a radge
or a schemie or a scaff
a bam, a ned, yob or chav

extend the vocabulary
and label me as other
poke fun at my accent and clothes
blame me for all that goes missing
for how standards are falling

criminalise my entire class
and judge me by my home address
raise your eyebrows at my manners
and at my failure to impress
turn indifference to contempt

and smugly feel good with yourself
since you seem to have done so well
and cringe at how I go around
sneering at my lack of taste
my words all wrong and out of place

and search my face for coming rage
confirming your deep prejudice
and fail to comprehend how this
responds to your great ignorance
of the class divide between us

Jim Aitken is a secondary teacher in Edinburgh. This poem was inspired by an incident in his first year class, with one pupil commenting on another – He’s such a chav, isn’t he? The opening line is adapted from the start of Moby Dick and this, together with the title, illustrates the monstrous, oceanic class divide in today’s Britain.

Some of Jim’s writings are in From the Front Line of Terror, published by the Stop the War Coalition & the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. £3 from SPSC, Peace & Justice Centre, Princes St., Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ.

by Jim Aitken

Jenin, o Jenin

dust, all over the camp,
has settled like a shroud

and this was supposed
to fight the terror
and deliver whatever

with Apache helicopters
themselves recalling
an earlier ethnic cleansing
raining down missile and flame

what havoc was wrought here
in refugee impoverishment
insults the whole of humanity
but it is those especially
who chose to be silent

and we know who they are
the ones who now prepare
in civilised Christian goodwill
silent too on Manger Square
after the dust has settled here
to change a regime elsewhere

and it is this silence that enabled
all the desecration to descend
the silence of willing accomplices
deliberate stalling diplomacies
while the crazed, cleaving butcher
unleashed his rabid hounds of war
and there are no streets anymore

those who did this seem to imitate
clinicians who once tormented them
with real talk of getting rid of lice
and the barbed camps of degeneration
and the absence of sanitation
no electricity or water
bulldozers shovelling the slaughter
like something from the Warsaw Ghetto

and now how to come back from this
demands psychiatric analysis
where once abused becomes abuser
trapped in the ghetto of traumatised minds
while new masters remain silent and blind
o if only perpetrators could see
how their actions will never make them free
and to excorcise their demons inside
and seek peace with the world on the outside

Jenin, o Jenin…

Jenin was written by Jim Aitken, who read it out to the Anti-War demonstration in Glasgow’s George
Square on April 27th. It is taken from the new book, From the Front Line of Terror, published
by the Stop the War Coalition & the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. £3 from SPSC, Peace & Justice Centre, Princes St., Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ.