International

Artillery rounds
and a barrage of shellfire
It looks and it sounds
like extending an empire

Bombing and shooting
civilians slain
Expansionist Putin
invading Ukraine

Threatening nukes
and rain hell from the skies
Dismissing rebukes
with chauvinist lies

Conscripts uprooting
and sent in to 'train'
Murderous Putin -
get out of Ukraine!

Her cover drive and how she ran
are now haram
under the rule of the Taliban

Can she stay in? For sure she can
She can't be out without a man
in ancient, new Afghanistan

She'd tackle assumptions and she'd score
but won't be playing any more
She's fallen foul of holy law

Published in Women's Fightback 26, Autumn/Winter 2021

Kelly Lindsey, former head coach of the Afghanistan women’s football team – and before that, US international player – spoke to supporters before Lewes FC women’s home friendly against West Ham on 22 August. She has been working to secure safe evacuation of footballing women and girls from Afghanistan, along with the director of women’s football, a human rights lawyer and FIFPRO (the international professional footballers’ federation, their trade union body). “For seven days straight we’ve created a team in the US, a team in Australia, a team in Europe, we have passed the baton all day and all night to try to keep the process going and try to keep the pressure on and try to keep pushing the government and try to keep pushing sports organisations.“

Trump set their touchpaper alight

They marched there tooled up for a fight

They're so convinced that they are right

And most still live - because they're white

China jails citizen journalist for Wuhan reports

Four years in jail for citizen reporter
Who spread the news from virus-struck Wuhan
Her mother cries in court to lose her daughter
She showed the world the sickness, did Zhang Zhan
So ominous the charges that they brought her
For breaking China’s free expression ban
Their stricken morals under smoking rubble,
‘Picking quarrels and provoking trouble’

One hundred years ago, an arts movement was forming in a mainly-black district of New York City. Later known as the Harlem Renaissance, it was primarily cultural but also inescapably political. Literature, poetry, jazz, theatre, sculpture and more articulated the lives and demands of African-Americans no longer willing to be grateful that they were no longer enslaved.

O black and unknown bards of long ago.
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?
Who first from out the still watch, lone and long.
Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise
Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?

James Weldon Johnson

Langston Hughes

Wrote poems in the rhythm of the blues

He gave folk the shivers

With 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'

Tony Abbott
jumps like a rabbit
from homophobic bile
to climate change denial

I have contributed this short article to Black History Month activities where I work.

Poems of the Harlem Renaissance
- recommended by Janine Booth