16 February, 2024.
1.
Rough and chivvying cold winds blow
The helpless dead leaves to and fro.
Leaves have no say in where they go
But we’re alive so can say no –
Let us praise those men who show
Resistance to the easy flow.
2.
Navalny, prisoner in the snow,
In numbing twenty-eight below,
Has paid the price for saying no;
He’s gone the way we feared he’d go.
That’s Putin, making sure all know
That retribution comes in tow
For those who won’t go with the flow.
‘All dissidents will finish so,’
The message is: ‘Go with the flow,
Or you too could end on Death Row.’
I imagine his warders: Did they know
A twinge of guilt at this, or show
Regret or shame? I doubt it. No –
Why should men let a conscience grow
When they can just go with the flow?
When life is so much easier so,
When every television show,
The papers and the radio
All radiate a conformist glow
Incessantly, so all men know
Life’s comfier with the status quo.
It’s only awkward sods say no,
Go their own way, not with the flow.
Those have a dangerous row to hoe,
And who can blame the average Joe
For on the whole deciding: ‘No,
That’s not for me. I’d rather toe
The line, collect my wages, know
I’m safe and needn’t undergo
What brave men have to suffer. No,
Go with the flow, go with the flow.’
3.
In Moscow brave girls risk a blow
By laying flowers in the snow
To honour him for saying ‘No’.
Brave girls. I admire them so.
*****
George Simmers writes: “This poem began because our local Arts Festival announced its theme as ‘Flow’. Which made me grumble a bit: was I supposed to write stuff about how nice it was that rivers flowed? Not my style. But then I thought about people who go against the flow by saying ‘No!’ and that suggested a subject and a rhyme scheme. It was only after I’d scribbled a few possible lines that I came across a photo of young women in Moscow placing flowers in the snow as tributes to the murdered Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny. In some towns, such protestors had been arrested or beaten up by the police.
“It’s thirty-odd years since I visited Russia. That was at the time of perestroika and hopefulness. We had a contact in Moscow who took us to see the sights, including the Arbat, a popular meeting- place. He said: ‘Can we stop and talk here for a few minutes? I ask because a few years ago If I had been seen here in conversation with a foreigner, I should have been arrested.’ Freedom was precious then, but repression returned.
“Navalny was a lawyer who campaigned against the corruption endemic in Russian political life. In 2020 he was poisoned with Novichok (probably by the Federal Security Service) ; after hospital treatment in Berlin that saved his life, he returned to Russia, even though he knew of the dangers. He was immediately arrested, and ended up in an Arctic Circle corrective colony. The exact circumstances of his death still remain unclear, but while in prison he had suffered from malnourishment and mistreatment.
“Writing this poem I remember Auden’s words: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Auden pointed out that political poems make the writer feel better, but have no positive effect in the real world. He was right, as usual, which is why I mostly avoid writing poems about politics. But I don’t really see this as a poem about Navalny. I could have chosen to write about Alan Bates and his twenty-five year battle for justice for postmasters, or about Kathleen Stock and others, who opposed the dangerous ideology of the Tavistock clinic. Going against the flow matters everywhere, not just Russia. The form is monorhyme, mostly because that’s how the poem started, and it wasn’t too difficult to keep going. Monorhyme is easier than it looks, so long as you choose the right rhyme word to start with. Don’t try it with ‘month’ or ‘silver’.
“Nalvalny’s death made a news splash in February, but since then more recent horrors have displaced it on the news pages. So maybe this poem will do a little good as a reminder of a brave man. Thank you for re-blogging it.”
The poem will be part of the film ‘Wordflow’ (a film by John Coombes with a soundtrack of stories and poems by Holmfirth Writers’ Group in a continuous showing from 10am-4pm), presented at the Holmfirth Arts Festival in Yorkshire on Sunday, June 16th, upstairs at the ‘Nowhere’ bistro, Norridge Bottom, Holmfirth, HD9 7BB.
George Simmers used to be a teacher; now he spends much of his time researching literature written during and after the First World War. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks, and his recent diverse collection is ‘Old and Bookish’.
Form in Formless Times 
Speaking of W. H. Auden’s enduring influence . . .
Karmic Journey
(after the style of W H Auden’s “Voltaire at Ferney”)
A Lucky, grateful man home from the US sphere
An exile, self-expatriated, free at last
From much that had defined me in my mediocre past
Like fear that I’d not live to see my sons grown men
As father, who died young, did not. But that was then.
In my own land an alien, so why not also here?
“Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden said it.
A statement true, insightful, and intelligent,
About polemics couched in verse penned by the passed and gone,
Aimed at the king’s abuses of the knight and pawn
Conscripted into companies for sale or rent
By those promoting war, who scarcely dread it.
Who reads this stuff? An “optimist” like poor Candide?
Who in the best of worlds found himself badly made.
Voltaire in neutral Switzerland had reasons to disguise
His royal targets in a cloak of comic shade.
Made ludicrous in metaphor, I recognize
Myself, impatient peasant poet gone to seed.
The time remaining dwindles yet the wars drag on
Few heed the blunted barbs and abstract angst implied
By similes connoting corpses in their shrouds interred;
By witticisms quaint; not stated but inferred;
Too indirect in style to name the ones that died
Or those who murdered millions, Satan’s spawn.
It makes no earthly matter which of two will win.
Both puppets owned by oligarchs will do the same.
Republicans will order. Democrats will ask
How best to beat down labor, their appointed task.
Republicans, for wealth, will set the world aflame.
The Democrats, we know, will bluster and give in.
“Don’t worry, they’re not Jesuits!” the natives cried,
Relieved to learn these White men wanted only gold.
Of Corporate rapacity, they had not yet been told:
That each and every resource any where around,
Including lakes of oil that lay beneath the ground,
These thieves would claim. Resistance, they would not abide.
“At least they’ll let us keep our souls,” the hopeful wished.
“No profits can there be in those,” or so they thought.
The businessman, they’d yet to learn, sold dear and cheaply bought
Just like the priests who lease or sell salvation. “See?
It costs us nothing yet the serfs will pay a fee
To dream of the eternal pond from which they’re fished.”
Against the killing of the light some men will rage,
And women, too; and some unsure; it matters not.
The poem’s a thing in which the country’s conscience, if it lives,
Is caught, and maybe purpose to the nation gives.
If otherwise, these lines will languish, left to plot
Rebellion unrevealed upon the passing page.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2019
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As for polemical (which includes political) verse compositions with all lines in a stanza rhymed (monorhyme). . .
A Sorry Solipsistic Siren Song
(We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here)
Around him in his court some scribes he kept
Who with informal nicknames proved adept
At not reporting all the times he slept
Or all the tasks at which he proved inept
As war up on our napping nation crept
Our vain imposter in a bubble ruled
A people often and completely fooled
Rejoicing in a leader so unschooled
That when he tried to speak he merely drooled
While in Iraq blood splattered, spread, and pooled
He felt no urgent need to change or tack
Because his troops, not he, absorbed the flak
He vowed to never waver or turn back
His yokel yodel, yammering, and yak
Left no doubt that his skull contained a crack
He found the country’s magic credit card
Left lying in the country’s open yard
Which meant he’d caught the country off its guard
Which others, too, found scarcely very hard:
A haughty herd hoist by its own petard
For who had placed such emptiness on top?
Who harvested this hollow, stunted crop?
Who let an addict start who couldn’t stop?
Who’d rather drink a river than a drop
Who needed babysitters as a prop
It doesn’t look too good for Uncle Sam
Whose credit rating just received a slam
For gambling debts from gamblers on the lam
Most notably the chief commanding sham
Who has a brain that doesn’t weigh a gram
Now trapped within the web of lies he spun
More dangerous than Cheney with a gun
(Who, when he aims at quail, the lawyers run)
His bloody mess he aims to leave undone
Few lesser “leaders” breathe beneath the sun
The nightlight shining softly by his bed
Illuminates an empty sleeping head
His dreams result in many people dead
His ancestors now hide in shameful dread
Embarrassed by the fool their genes have bred
Yet no one seems to know just what to do
About a man who governs for the few
Who takes a jaunty jaded jaundiced view
Of those he sees as subjects he can screw
Or troops that he can bleed till they turn blue
His party and his pundits say they see
Some pants invisible to you and me
Which only those with his same pedigree
Would witness by imperial decree
Or, when so ordered, drop their own and pee
Not much is left of that proud liberty
That once Americans considered free
Now stolen by this spawn of larceny
Who stamps as “secret” his known perfidy
Who cannot face the truth, his enemy
He says we can’t be trusted if we know
What he has done and how he plans to blow
More billions causing needless blood to flow
With nothing ever offered up to show
Why he should not up on the scaffold go
A necktie party, yes, might do the trick
Some tar and feathers, too, for George and Dick
Who’ve earned their names: the Codpiece and the Prick
Who sold some snake oil to the deathly sick
Who ordered much but never served a lick
Ulysses chained himself but not his crew
Their ears he stopped against the sounds that slew
And thus they rowed through waves and winds that grew
While he strove with the only gods he knew
So he could pass, yet hear their music, too
But our King George the Worst stays on the docks
And waves “goodbye” as troopships leave the locks
His motto: “After You!” no longer shocks
As he hires other men to tend his flocks
While carpetbagger cronies hump their stocks
Which leads us to Barack Obama, known
For making Dubya’s wars his very own
And adding to them others which have grown
(Through profligate employment of the drone)
Into the body-count and free-fire zone
Which our lost War on Southeast Asia taught
Us to regard as surefire proof of naught
But only bogus bullshit numbers fraught
With lies our “leaders” sold themselves, then bought
Which only left them on the hook and caught
So Dimwit Dubya has a dark-skinned clone:
Obama, whose failed wars have only shown
That no amount of more war can atone
For waging stupid murder from the throne
Of presidential twerp testosterone
A sorry solipsistic siren song
A darkness deeper than the night is long
In their mad minds no right can do a wrong
And fatal weakness only signals strong
A blind man would have seen it all along
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006-2015
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