Sometimes you feel
that you are living through important times, life-changing times – and sometimes
you are. I do not have a World War as
part of my memory and those times where the world has allegedly changed I did
not feel that I was an integral part of that process. It was as if the change was something
important that was going on outside my everyday experience and it could be
relayed to me by television and the press, dressed up by columnists informing me
about how the days we were living through were significant; I could read about
it in books later and see the historic period that I had daydreamed through in
its proper context.
The 3-day week; the Miners’ Strike; The
Falklands Conflict; The Cold War; wars various and international; the EU;
Brexit; The Financial Crash and all the other events. I went on working and getting paid. What really changed?
One feels that Covid-19 is something that
must (surely) make a lasting difference.
People have died. The whole of
our way of life has been disrupted. Our
political masters have been at best inept and at worst criminally
culpable. Things cannot be the same
after the crisis is over. Or can they?
The poem today considers memory and how we
deal with it. The horrific journey I
made from Turkey to Wales in the 1980s was one that I swore I would never smile
about; it was just too awful to be softened by time into something
acceptable. But it was so softened and
has become something I can look back on and remember with affection.
I am not saying that the present crisis is
going to be something that we can look back on and smile, though I am sure that
there will be funny aspects of it for individuals – as long as they
survive. And it is that survival that is
a crucial aspects of the crisis.
We are all involved in the crisis because
we are in lockdown. But I don’t know
anyone who has had the virus and I therefore don’t know anyone who has
died. Every day we have statistics that
point out the numbers of the infected around us and the number of the dead –
but none of them are those we know. So
the crisis is real and at the same time unreal.
We believe what we are told but have no experience of what the statistics
say. So how, eventually, will we look
back on this time.
As we are literally in the middle of the
crisis (geographically and statistically) we have a long way to go before
hindsight can come into play. But the
poem speculates now.
Choice
I told myself I’d
never smile
when I recall what
I endured
on foot, by car,
in taxi, plane and bus
to get from Turkey
back to Wales:
English
swearing, foul-mouthed scrum;
threatened
Tarom Airway clerk;
German,
shouting, lost it, gone;
Russian
wanting to defect;
Cyclist,
Czech with eyes on West;
baying
crowds for Tarom blood!
Details thump back
as I think
with anger, pain
and disbelief.
But let the
narrative go hang
on spoken scraps
that I can list:
“The
plane is full! Join other queue!”
“There
might be. Another one.”
“No
pounds! No dollars! Only lei!”
“Do
you drink Vodka, and with Coke?”
“What?
London flight is gone! Is gone!”
“Calmo! Calmo!
Calmo!”
“An
hour, or maybe two – who knows?”
“This
ticket doesn’t get a seat.”
But I’m chuckling
as I write,
the nightmare
gentled into tale.
But.
Some memories will
always hurt
beyond the smile of
edited recall,
because it’s simply
right they should.
Sharpness blunts
with time, they say,
but the unwary,
careless thought
can snag and rip the
opening wound
(that never, ever,
really healed) and
the old lemon’s
squeezed again
in open eyes that bring
the brine
to soak away the stubborn
stains
hid out of sight,
but not of mind
of deaths, mistakes,
and nastiness,
chicanery dressed
up as truth,
the lies, from
grey to black and white,
and things that live
in metaphor:
the accusations
from faith past
of things
undone and those things done
and there’s no health.
And how will we
look back on this,
when we’ve decided
where we are,
and just how is it
we’re involved,
when all mortality
is ‘over there’
and death is nobody
we know?
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