POLITICS & SOCIETY

Society and politics.

The Bricklayers

~ Christina Egan ~ Leave a comment

The Bricklayers


I.

We are the bricklayers:
we lay the next layer of bricks
in colours of coal and cream
and mustard and rust,
and the next and the next,
where it fits, where it clicks,
bricks upon bricks upon bricks.

We are the people
who have made the big city.

We have walked here over the hills,
we have sailed here and settled,
we have woven the brittle wattle
and cast the wayward clay into bricks
and levelled the luminous limestone
for thousands of years. Our stories
still run underneath the pavement,
in the veins of the hidden rivers.

II.

We are the bricks:
We come in in all sizes, in all shades
of beige and brown and black,
the walls next to each other
and often the bricks, mixed,
a mosaic, haphazard and rough,
like the bark of a London plane-tree.

We are the people
who make up the big city.

We have moulded and sawed,
we have woven and sown,
we have carried and ferried
and bartered on the market.
We have brought up and taught,
we have cared for and cured,
invented, imagined,
and immortalised.

Christina Egan ©2023

speaking through a mask / masked ball

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speaking through a mask

I am writing on the wall
in lurid colours
painting mouthless faces
naming faceless fears
the hydra of the mutating germ
the wheel of the rotating power
filling the space by the street
with the sunflower yellow of hope
one day it will be overwritten
by times to come and poets to come

Christina Egan ©2021

masked ball (2021)

faces half brown half bluish
faces half white half scarlet
eyes half compassion half suspicion
eyes half hope half fear

muffled by makeshift masks
we pass each other in haste
in the high road in the car park
at the chemist’s in the churchyard

we step left we step right
or we turn our backs
in a staccato dance
a bizarre masked ball

two layers of paper
between us and a fog of fatigue
two layers of cotton
between us and a grip round the throat

half-masked half-hidden at last
from the hidden bulging eyes
from the sleepless blinking brains
of total control

we scurry off or stride off
into the maze of lanes
where even the action men
on the walls wear masks

faces half brown half bluish
faces half white half scarlet
we are mutating towards
a stronger strain of humankind

Christina Egan ©2021

The poem speaking through a mask was inspired by photographs in the Tottenham Community Press and published by the same newspaper in TCP Issue 43, February 2021. It continues as the Haringey Community Press.

Tottenham is full of art in in very bright colours: graffiti on walls, mosaics on houses, paintings on roll-shutters of shops…

The fear expressed in these lines is of the malicious pandemic as well as of total surveillance. The masks gave us a chance to protect us from both to an extent.

I had great hopes that the pandemic would change our society to become more local, sustainable, authentic, co-operative, considerate… more healthy in every respect.

Sadly, only some positive outcomes have persisted against the pressure of ever more exploitation, exhaustion, pollution, production, consumption, and waste.

Image: Red camera eye of HAL 9000 (from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’).
Julian Mendez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dancing on the Beach

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Dancing on the Beach

I woke up to a world
where the bears and the bees
had not cast their ballots
but the humans had:

a brave brand-new world
where an abundance
of guns guaranteed
safety and peace,

where an ample range
of promises rained down
on the fields like fertiliser,
tremendous and toxic,

and where the deceitful tongue
was spreading like the olive-tree
in the house of God,
laughing us to scorn.

I woke up to a crowd
dancing on the beach, drunk,
while the floods were gathering
from the heights and the horizon,

a world watching and filming
on ten thousand screens
its boats and its bridges
falling apart. I woke up.

Christina Egan ©2024

On Nov. 5th, 2024, it became evident that the great project of democracy
is about to destroy itself, taking the whole of our civilisation with it.

Trefflich (Gazakrieg)

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Trefflich

Ach, wozu noch Meeresblau
je beschwören und wozu
Wellenschlag und Morgentau,
wenn ein Paar bestickter Schuh
bunt aus Schutt und Asche schaut,
– angefaucht und fortgefegt –
und die namenlose Braut
nie mehr ihre Füße hebt,
nie ein Kind zum Himmel hält…
Ach, wie bleibt das Meer bloß blau?
Denn es stirbt die ganze Welt,
frißt der Drache eine Frau.
Fällt die Kugel einen Mann,
klagt ein ganzes Engelheer.
Lautlos schreit ein Schlüsselbund
a­­us dem Schrott,– doch hört ihn wer?
Paßt der Schlüssel auch ins Schloß,
hängt die Tür in schräger Wand,
denn ein treffliches Geschoß
riß das Haus halb in den Sand.
Immer wieder gibt es Krieg
voller Lügen, voller Lärm.
Niemals aber gibt es Sieg,
nur die Hoffnung wie ein Stern.

Christina Egan ©2024
(Gazakrieg)

In this poem, War is personalised as a hissing dragon burning, devouring, or blasting away everything in its way.

The title is a pun on an old word for “excellent”, literally “hitting precisely”: in a war, success is based on destruction.

On October 7th, 2023, the Palestinian terror organisation Hamas committed a massacre and mass abduction in Israel, whereupon the Israeli Government launched a war on the Palestinian territory of Gaza. It has since attacked the West Bank and invaded neighbouring country Lebanon, where the terror organisation Hezbollah de facto rules. The aim on both sides is evidently genocide. This is destruction against destruction, revenge upon revenge, genocide versus genocide.

The Red Helicopter (Tottenham)

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The Red Helicopter
(Tottenham)

Some of us are pushing the swings
in the park, a powerful pendulum,
some are hurrying for their daily bread,
counting the pennies in their pockets,
and all are treading on rustling leaves,
fallen too soon, too soon this year,
for the world is brittle with heat
and creaking and breaking apart.

The rain has come and gone
but the clouds have stayed:
No rainbow today
over the weathered church.
The blue emerges, the brightness
of grass, of the thousand things,
and the old oak stands smiling.
Higher the swings go and higher –

Then the sky bursts
with the lion’s roar
of the helicopter, closer, close,
here, the colour of blood.
And we look at each other
and fear the worst and
know it has happened
again.

A street between brick walls,
a random courtyard
or a random corner
has been stained,
and from the earth cries
someone’s blood,
someone’s brother’s blood,
our brother’s blood.

Christina Egan ©2023

I have seen the red helicopter of the emergency services land in parks in Tottenham (Lordship Recreation Ground and Bruce Castle Park). In both cases it was the middle of the day, and in both cases, a teenager had been stabbed, once fatally and once nearly so. Another young man was shot and left to die in Tottenham Cemetery. All these green spaces are vast and idyllic.

See Himmelblaue Uhr (Tottenham) for Bruce Castle Park as a haven of tranquillity and Gedächtnisgarten zu Tottenham for the old cemetery as a garden of peace.

The Komodo Dragons

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The Komodo Dragons

The roots of the forest are trembling,
the branches are frosted with fear.
The jeeps and the tanks are assembling.
The komodo dragons are near.

Their skin’s like the ice on the river,
they graze and they raze all that breathes.
The roofs of the cottages shiver.
The earth has gone silent. She grieves.

The earth has lost too many children
before the full moon could return.
The komodo dragons are grinning.
The roofs of the cottages burn.

The stable aflame and the steeple –
the ice on the river now thaws.
This is not the war of the people.
This is the triumph of the jaws.

Christina Egan ©2022

This poem was published (as The Comodo Dragons) in the Haringey Community Press (circulation 15,000) in May 2022.

Photograph: Dezidor, CC-BY-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Komodo dragons got their name because they appear to be mythical creatures, but are real animals, huge lizards which can devour their prey almost without trace.

Two years ago today, the Ukraine was brutally attacked by the military machinery of another country.

When we fear with and grieve with the Ukraine, there are always echos of the Second World War, the First World War, and other wars. My verse is influenced by the famous sonnet Andreas Gryphius wrote in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, Thrähnen des Vaterlandes / Anno 1636 (Tears of the Fatherland).

dream laundry

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dream laundry

fast cars smart cars
fast food slow food
fast luck long luck
you can buy anything

the smiling people
the gliding people
the glossy people
on the posters prove it

you can buy their sofa
you can buy their surfboard
you can buy their smartphone
and relax indefinitely

you can buy their dreams
you can buy their memories
and your own memories
like tinned meat

boots on the beach
music on the pillow
pills for your babies
subscribe to well-being

Front page of newspaper

everything is for sale
everything is on sale
every offer must end
but there is no end of offers

look here click here
see more do more
book now pay later
life is a cake

grab a coffee
grab a seat
snatch a date
download a dream

Christina Egan ©2019

This poem is also published in a local paper today, in print and online: Haringey Community Press, February 2024 (circulation 15,000).

The title is taken from Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem Reklame (1956), where she coins the word “Traumwäscherei” (dream laundry, laundry of dreams or through dreams?). The omnipresent publicity and cheerful music soothe your worries and questions – until they stop and leave you in “Totenstille” (deadly silence, or silence of the dead?).

The idea of downloading memories and dreams comes from science-fiction such as Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982), M. T. Anderson’s novel Feed (2002), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021). All three are superb and thoroughly disquieting.

The line “boots on the beach” comes from a particularly stupid – and sexist – video advertising hard drink by showing a young woman in a very scanty dress and very heavy boots. It played on a loop on several screens in a railway station so that there was no escape from it.

The line “music on the pillow” is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), where he predicts ceaseless entertainment broadcast onto our walls, even inviting participation, and into our ears, continuing into our sleep. The result is isolation and despair.

Die Welt ist still

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Die Welt ist still

Ich sitze unter einem Baum
im Blätterzelt, im Schattenkreis;
die Welt ist still und bunt und heiß,
hoch oben wölbt sich weißer Flaum…
Ein Sommertraum.

Der stolze Pomp war Schall und Schaum,
die rasche Mode Funkenflug,
das Tretradtreten war Betrug!
Ich sitze unter einem Baum,
man glaubt es kaum.

Das Bildgewebe war ein Zaun,
ein Katzengold der ganze Schatz,
ein Karussell die ganze Hatz –
Die Ruhe schafft dem Atem Raum:
Frag’ nur den Baum.

Christina Egan © 2020

For English poems from the Covid-19 lockdown,
see Notnormal and the parallel texts Hidden Rivers /
Verborgne Flüsse.

For those who were not ill with the terrible virus, 
the key experience may have been, paradoxically:
I can breathe… For once, there was time to breathe —
and air to breathe!

Farbechte Hoffnung

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Farbechte Hoffnung

Der Behälter enthält
eine bunte Matratze,
einen kleinen Fernseher
und eine Familie:
Mann, Frau und Kind.

Jeder von ihnen marschierte
durch Wüsten und Sümpfe
mit einem Rucksack voll Kleidern
und einer Tasche voll Träumen.

Träumen von Süßigkeiten
und Brot, von Spiel
und Arbeit, von Frieden.

Träume von Alltag.
Träume von Schlaf.
Träume von Heimat.

Der Behälter enthält
drei hungrige Menschen,
drei hungrige Herzen
und viele Ballen farbechter Hoffnung.

Christina Egan © 2016

“Dreams of everyday life. Dreams of sleep. Dreams of home.”

This poem was inspired by the photograph of a refugee family in the excellent newspaper Agora, at the end of a year of mass migration into Germany. See also my previous poem Kerzenbekrönt, which shows the idyllic side of Christmas in Germany.

The homeless family in the photo — a man, a woman and a child — will remind Christians of the ‘Holy Family’ of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, who were sheltering in a stall for animals when Jesus was born. I assume the editors of Agora chose this motif for their photo montage consciously.

This poem may work in a translation software.

Notnormal

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Notnormal

Lightningwhite
vast rib vaults
suspended
in brilliantblue
and a rainbow frame
dazzling and doubling and
tripling
around Broadwater Farm.

Large deep-yellow flower shaped like a star with five points.Four feet tracing
pavements pathways
the brooks underground
the trains underground
with the windinyourhair
and the sunonyourskin.

Fivefoldflame flowers
dancing for joy
rolling up into fruit
while ivory butterflies
and bumblebees feed
on lavender forests.

Time to cook
food and eat
food
Time to talk
into a telephone
time to talk
Orange soup in blue bowl on placemat striped orange and blue.talkandlisten
Timetogether.

All this is not normal.

All this is mental
detrimental
to your output
to your outfit
on all platforms
detrimental
to your attitudes
to your platitudes
diametrical
to the narrative.

This is the new
Notnormal.
This must stop
fullstop.

Kestrel egg, quite round, buff and dappled.Otherwise
more stained statues will fall
and heads of heads will roll
and skyscrapers skygraters
surveying the Thames
will be kestrels’ apartments
their amenities reclaimed
by the reeds and the weeds
by the swans and the swifts
by the songs in the dusk
and the
silence
under the crystal crescent.

Christina Egan © 2020

Hoping for a revolution in the suspended time of the C-19 pandemic…

Under the lockdown, the air had become so clear that on May 1st, 2020, I did see a triple rainbow around the apartment blocks of Broadwater Farm.

For more thoughts from the first phase of the pandemic in London in spring 2020, see Hidden Rivers / Verborgne Flüsse.

Courgette flower / Carrot soup. Photographs: Christina Egan © 2020. — Kestrel egg at the Muséum de Toulouse. Photograph by Didier Descouens via Wikimedia. Copyright: CC BY-SA 3.0.