Riders of the Whales
I turn my face towards you
the riders of the waves
the riders of the whales
not as masters
but as friends
I lay the shimmering isles
into your unknown hands
I lift my smile
like a bright-blue flag
to one who wields the wand
and strikes the rock
to turn the wasteland
velvety and fragrant
once again
I lift my cup
of bittersweet brew
to one who turns the wheel
and shifts the clouds
to make the frosty stream
a sparkling wall
once again
I sweep the ashes
and lay the bricks
I feed the seeds for you
I grow the words for you
I beg your forgiveness
and scatter blessings on you
the yet unborn
Christina Egan ©2021
POLITICS & SOCIETY
Society and politics.
Klebstoff (Schlußverkauf II)
II.
Klebstoff
Wir produzieren Klebstoff
und das passende Lösemittel,
Lösungen Ihrer Probleme
zum persönlichen Sonderpreis.
Wir verkaufen etwas Klebriges
und etwas Erlösendes.
Wir produzieren Stickstoff,
Kraftstoff, Kunststoff
und Kunst,
Lehrstoff, Lachstoff
und Lust
zum Herunterladen [HIER].
Wir erwerben begeistert
Möbel fürs Heimbüro,
quadratisch, praktisch
und weißer als weiß,
Möbel zum Zusammenklappen
und Wegwerfen.
Wir werben kostenfrei
für fehlerlose Photographien,
wiederverwertbare Worte,
verwechselbare Musik.
Wir verarbeiten die Wirklichkeit
in Träume zum Abspulen [HIER].
Wir konsumieren gehorsam
naturidentische Nahrungsstoffe
und gehirngemäße Beweisstoffe
in mundgerechten Bissen.
Wir verwandeln die Welt
in einen Erlebnispark.
Wir sind die Gesellschaftsfabrik
im kollektiven Glück.
Wir sind die Fabrikgesellschaft.
Wir sind Konsum und Produkt.
Dies ist der Schlußverkauf:
Greifen Sie zu!
Christina Egan ©2023
For the first poem in the
Great Sales cycle, see
Erdbeerjoghurt
(Strawberry Yoghurt).
Portrait of a society
of over-consumption
and auto-destruction.
Kurt Schwitters: MERZ 458 WRIEDT (Collage, 1922).
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Erdbeerjoghurt (Schlußverkauf I)
Der große Schlußverkauf
I.
Erdbeerjoghurt
Heute kaufen wir Erdbeeren
wie Herzen im Bilderbuch,
Früchte von satter Farbe
und blassem Geschmack.
Wir filmen sie fraglos, und uns,
für unsere Freundesfreunde.
Wir löffeln Erdbeerjoghurt,
richtig schön rosa und süß,
für rosige süße Kinder,
für rosige süße Münder,
aus erbveränderten Sojabohnen
und holzgewonnenem Geschmack.
Donner? Im Sudan oder sonstwo
wird geschossen, also schalten wir
um. Hier herrscht Waffenstillstand.
Hier fließen noch Wasser und Erdöl
und Hintergrundmusik. Im Mai
ist der Wald gerade schön grün.
Wir verwerten die Pappkartons
vorschriftsgemäß und bestellen
freitags nur Avocados, mit Trinkgeld
für die Bedienung und Trostpflaster
für die Flüchtlinge. Wir sind grasgrün.
Wir sitzen im Erdbeerjoghurt.
Christina Egan ©2023
The first poem in the cycle The Great Sales about a society merrily destroying itself with over-consumption, pollution, and war, drowning out any doubts with mass media and social media, and buying its conscience off with recycling a little and donating a little.
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy.
John Berger
The Bricklayers
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
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
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)
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)
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
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.
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
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
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.
Christina Egan 
