Internal Affairs (For Janey Hinch)
I wrote this piece after a fellow student on my masters course posted a poem by Palestinian-American poet-journalist Noor Hindi called ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying’
Additionally I also found it an incredibly sombre experience to attend a Free Palestine protest in Northampton in May 2021.
My degree was a gentleman’s club
of dead poets. Tattooed trees planted by
corpsed hands from the Firm of
of Pitt & Pitt, an England gassed
by the Etonian variant. I wanted to pen
incantations on #MeToo and BLM
but we were forced to write about stems
and rosebuds. So, naturally I wrote of 400 years
in verse and line breaks that bloomed claret
not the sustained incandescence of the Mayflower
in big 2021 … but Black Britain looks cross-eyed
at the British Museum. Despite the
asylum-like White walls, 180,000 Londoners
marched for a free Palestine –
a nation state that rose out of the state
of this nation, Winston Churchill at half-mast
out of the fog of war. Israeli tanks move
like cockroaches in the spectral flame of Blighty
I wish I could write poetry for amusement,
you know about how dead White men write
about York roses and their love of nation states
I know I am British because when I watch
genocide in Gaza, the £5 in my pocket blows up
where the sun never sets on the British Empire
my lecturer asks me to write about flowers
so I write about the petals on the Gaza strip
the stacks of winter roses outside Grenfell,
whose heads open and close
like grenades … little footballs in an orange sunset
I hate talking in metaphors:
Black Lives Matter. Free Palestine. Tax the Rich.
Martin, Malcolm, and Angela
all spoke out against the Israeli state
let’s send roses to Downing Street in dissent
perhaps Boris will smell the flowers for Lent.
One day I will I write about flowers. How about that, Petal?
