‘And remember to give them hope.’
Looking back, the words seem to echo. On 19 December 2023, Rachel Reeves was speaking from the pulpit at the memorial service of Alastair Darling in an overflowing St Mary’s Cathedral, the Episcopal one at Edinburgh’s West End.
Then shadow chancellor, she paid tribute to the much-respected man she described as her mentor, most memorably adding a moving description of her recent visits to Edinburgh. Despite his advancing cancer, Alastair Darling was following Jeremy Hunt’s budget statement due on 22 November with keen interest (Alastair Darling died surrounded by family on 30 November).
When Rachel Reeves asked him how she should respond to Hunt’s statement, she told us, the former chancellor replied:
Make sure the sums add up
Don’t get caught in a political trap
And remember to give them hope
What hope? With so many political traps set, so much ill-willing media, and such a confusion of sums to add up, hope will be squeezed into a tight space between fiscal fine tuning and real-life experience of ‘ordinary people’. There will be much talk of winners and losers and very little contact between those who strike lucky and unlucky.
Who and where are life’s winners and losers? North, South, East, West, there’s precious little poetry in the words and numbers of budgets, but pausing for breath on edge of Winter Solstice darkness, here’s a selection of poems drawing on a wealth of experience, the kind of human insight that could enhance political debate – and open a path to hope.
1. Who is counting?
Race is a funny word
It implies someone will win
American Arithmetic: Natalie Diaz
Counting was the theme of this year’s National Poetry Day. But what does counting mean for the millions of people who are numbers not names, the ones who don’t really count?
Natalie Diaz’s American Arithmetic is an arresting protest laying bare the official data that renders thousands of Native Americans invisible, the state-sanctioned abuse concealed in statistics. In prosaic terms, the poet tells us Native Americans make up less than one per cent of the American population, yet 1.9% of all police killings, ‘the highest per capita of any race’.
Nathalie Diaz, Pulitzer prize winning poet, associate professor, former professional basketball player and Mojave American activist, was born and grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. That’s where she learned to count.
American Arithmetic, from the Colonial Love Song collection published in 2020, is set in the US but echoes across the world. Powerful, poignant and sometimes painfully playful, it prods meaningless terms into life; the racism hidden in that ‘funny word’ race. Sometimes it means run. It implies someone will win. ‘Who wins the race that is not a race?’
2. The listening mode, instead of ‘point of order’
I’m puzzled by my loss of memory
The sudden cull of my vocabulary
Forgotten: David Perman
Here is unexpected hope. David Perman’s Collected and New Poems includes three poems confronting his stroke. Head on. Exploring a strange new landscape without maps, groping for names in his garden of now anonymous roses, meeting loved-ones without labels on the doorstep – trying to make sense of a world that is both familiar and foreign, rediscovery is part of the recovery, and it is recorded movingly in poetry of courageous insight.
A cull of vocabulary might seem particularly cruel to someone who made a living from language. In 20 years of working for BBC World Service, David Perman managed radio broadcasts in English, Arabic and Greek. He was A Square Peg in Bush House, In retirement he publishes and writes poetry. Known for his quick-witted repartee, ‘shooting from the lip’, after his stroke he found a blockage slowing the flow – and yet, against expectation, decides it’s much better that way.
Not just for me but for a wider world perhaps
How second thoughts might deepen debate
Make politics more palatable
The listening mode instead of ‘point of order’
Might make markets pause and be
more mature, might restrain the guns
while communications prospered –
no more shooting from the hip, so to speak
Repartee: David Perman
Oh
3. Fear not. The Future is not F*cked
yiv aywiz bin free, ma quine, it’s jist
humankind is a god factory.
yer aye churnin oot deities
Gloria in Exelsisoleum: Mae Diansangu
‘How do we let go of the world of oil and all it represents? Friends of the Earth Scotland put the question politicians find safer to dodge (does it feature in budget or election debates?) to poets in The Future is not F*cked a brilliantly conceived spoken word night in Aberdeen, the city where ‘some people have three cars’
That night produced a film and a book. Watch the film (HERE) download the book (HERE).
If only more activism was so carefully constructed: connecting rather than dividing. The Future is not F*cked began with FoE’s Just Transition Organiser for the North East, Scott Herrett, who wanted to use art to kindle hope of a new future in a city where oil binds so many lives together.
The black stuff still flows (you will have noticed). But screenings in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh have stirred animated discussion inspired by stories of real people whose lives depend on oil. Or do they? ‘An fa telt ye, ye wis powerless? asks Mae Diansangu in her rousing Gloria in Excelsisoleum as the ‘crude god’ becomes a ‘finite god’.
The poetry in Doric, Scots and English is powerful and deeply personal. Spoken from experience.
Crude weeps into the driip-tray of my nightmares
sour gas pollutes my palate, guilt saturates
everything we knew because – of course, we knew
NRRD: John Bolland
The Future is not F*cked is available for community screening.
4. Just be sure that you’re still feeling
See all the shit-stained statues
With all their ancient values
Those cocrete ghosts
that still decide
Be the Hammer: Aidan Moffat
‘We’ll still be here.’ There’s a promise, and a warning in Be the Hammer, the last track on the first album by Andrew Wasylyck and Tommy Perman. Ash Grey and the Gull Glides Home is an experimental collaboration of soaring new music at times both uplifting and unsettling, joyous and searching. Aidan Moffat’s sonorous song poem at the end adds a lingering, ambiguous message.
Towards the closing of a year when democracy shudders in fright, one image in particular sticks in my mind: those ‘shit-stained statues’ and the ancient values that still decide. The concrete ghosts that shape the laws that support the status quo, keeping us all in our rightful place.
Who are we? Where do we stand? Winners, losers? Accepting or resisting? Ready to rebuild?
Be the hammer invites connection. There’s no room for apathy. Moffat’s deep warm drone (like a priest, I think, without a catechism) is strangely comforting in its strong insistence. ‘Just be sure that you’re still feeling’. Here we all are, then. And (politicians take note) ‘Come tomorrow we’ll still be here’.
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