Glimpsing the future

I remember being at school and writing an essay on the 21st century. All those years ago it seemed so far in the future – and yet so full of possibilities, too. I wrote about flying cars and an age of ease made possible by the science of robotics. I wrote about space exploration and the bases we’d construct on the Moon and on Mars –

Now, here we are and what have we got? A bright orange automaton in the White House and a pandemic shutting down most of the world’s economy. And if that isn’t bad enough, toilet rolls are still hard to get. Well, reality certainly threw a hand grenade into those long-ago predictions of mine, didn’t it?

But you know the worse thing? The thing that’s really peed me off? “Domestic abuse surges during coronavirus lockdown in UK”! Can you believe it? With all that’s happening in the world, individuals living under the same roof turn feckin’ feral. In the UK a pioneering project called “Counting Dead Women” has recorded at least 16 domestic abuse killings of women and children between 23 March, when the lockdown began, and 12 April. That’s double the (already mind-bending) average of two women murdered by men per week. Calls to domestic violence helplines have increased by 120% while traffic to their websites is tripling. Un-feckin’-believable!

Enter Death

We know nothing of this going.
It excludes us. Faced with death,
what cause have we to respond
with the fear and grief or even hatred

that twist the features to a mask of tragedy?
On this side of death we play roles.
So long as we seek to please the audience,
death, who needs no approval, plays us.

When you died, there broke across the stage,
through the gash your leaving made,
a shaft of reality: green of real green,
real sunlight, real trees.

Still we keep acting: fearful and solemn,
reciting our script, taking on gestures.
But you, who have been withdrawn from us,
subtracted from our very being,

now and again you overcome us,
showing us the reality we glimpsed,
so that for a while, jolted back, we are life
with no thought of applause.

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

Gretel in Darkness:

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas….

Now, far from women’s arms
And memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln –

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the fire in earnest.

Louise Glück

I’m not a girl

I’m not a girl
                              I’m a hatchet
I’m not a hole
                                         I’m a whole mountain
I’m not a fool
                              I’m a survivor
I’m not a pearl
                                          I’m the Atlantic Ocean
I’m not a good lay
                                      I’m a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness

Judy Grahn

for willyce

When i make love to you
i try
with each stroke of my tongue
to say i love you
to tease i love you
to hammer i love you
to melt i love you

& your sounds drift down
oh god!
oh jesus!
and i think –
here it is, some dude’s
getting credit for what
a woman
has done
again.

Pat Parker
(Published in lesbian tide vol. 3 no. 9, may 1974)

partly why they love me

She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave.

Jeanette Winterson
Why be happy when you could be normal

from days that had been lost

The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer.

Lord Dunsany
The King of Elfland’s Daughter

a sound like November wind

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.

Ray Bradbury
The Fog Horn

the breath of God

Wealth was the power to set things and people in motion; and in America, therefore, wealth came to be frankly regarded as the breath of God, the divine spirit immanent in man. God was the supreme Boss, the universal Employer.

Olaf Stapledon
Last and First Men

the UFOs will return

With lockdown ending in various parts of Europe, you can be certain that the UFOs will return to this sad old Earth of ours. Peedeel will resume his monitoring duties, boys & girls, in the hope of keeping you safe from the Old Dark Ones Aliens.