I walked out of the smoky streets

To enjoy some country air,

But when I came to the crossroads,

I saw a weird sight there –

A man in a silver business suit

Swivelling in a black leather chair

He jumped right up and shook my hand

and giggled with mysterious glee.

Then he stared and said: ‘Old Labour,

I can tell your destiny.

I’m the Great Political Entrepreneur –

Would you like to do a deal with me?’

Well, the style of his smile and the size of his eyes

Made him look like a shopping mall.

I told him straight: ‘I’m a socialist,

I support fair shares for all.’

He said: ‘Capitalism means fair shares,

Provided that you play ball.’

I said: ‘I can think of something

Capitalism can’t arrange

And that’s the common ownership

Of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

And war makes so much more profit

That the idea of peace is strange.

‘I was born for peace and justice

For every race and nationality

I’m for people, not for profit,

I want to see the children free

With no more than 12 kids in a class

Revelling in liberty.’

‘But let’s not talk about the people,’

The sophisticated stranger said.

‘You must have targets of your own -

Let’s talk about you instead.’

And my brain was enthralled by his silver voice

Though my heart was filled with dread.

‘I know you have a heart,’ said the shining voice

‘And I know you have an excellent mind.

Why not become an Entrepreneur -

Leave those people of yours behind?

You shall live in mansions and grand hotels

And be constantly wined and dined.

‘You shall have your own island and bodyguard

And your own show on TV,

And a heated pool and a gymnasium

And become a powerful Celebrity.’

‘I think I could fancy that,’ I said,

‘But what’s the cost going to be?’

Well, I knew. But I signed – in my own life-blood.

He extracted my soul with care

and placed it in his credit card case

And gave me his black leather chair

Then he laughed and said: ‘You are New Labour now.’

I said: ‘Thank you, Mr Blair.’

Arms trade workers, here’s an early warning

You might wake up tomorrow morning

And find that this is the glorious day

When all your jobs will just melt away

Because the people of the world are going to make sure

There’ll be no more, no more, no more war

So now’s the time to switch your occupation

From dealing in death and desolation

Don’t hang around now you’ve been told

The international murder trade’s about to fold

You won’t have to maim, you won’t have to kill,

You can use your brain and use your skill.

Peace needs workers of all kinds-

Make artificial limbs instead of landmines.

Tricycles instead of tridents,

Violins instead of violence,

Lifeboats, hospitals, medicine, drains,

Food and toys and buses and trains-

Come on, there’s plenty of work to be done

If we’re going to make peace for everyone.

_
_

Peacetime Haiku

Try one hundred years

Without any wars at all -

Let’s see if it works!

_
_

Slavery and War

The planet earth in 1787 AD

More than three-quarters of its people

Were in bondage of some kind,

Including serfdom and slavery,

80.000 Africans were chain and fettered

and taken to the new world every year.

There was no anti-slavery campaign.

On May 22nd 1787

Twelve men met in London printing shop.

The campaign against slavery began.

There were slaves and free activists,

Quakers, atheists,

And men, women and children

Who loved freedom.

They were mocked as wild, impractical dreamers.

They had no e-mails or TV,

No radio or telephones,

But they found ways of showing the world

The obscenity of slavery.

So they abolished

First the international slave trade

And then slavery itself.

It was hard work.

It took them about fifty years.

Only fifty years.

Today we can use e-mail and TV, Radio and telephones.

We can abolish

First the international arms trade

And then war itself.

It’ll be hard work.

Might take as long as twenty years.

Adrian Mitchell, September 2005
(Written after reading Bury the Chains – The British struggle to abolish slavery by Adam Hochschild. Macmillan: £20)

But the Iraq Occupation Focus poetry competition won’t make anybody rich. The object is not money or prestige, but enlightenment. It was obvious that among the millions who marched against the invasion of Iraq, the longing for peace and an end to all war was running like a tidal wave.

The emotions and dreams and visions of those people – us – were bound to overflow into conversations, speeches, banners, paintings, songs, dances, plays and poems.

These poems are poems that had to be written. Many of them, I guess, were written through tears. But they weren’t written to make the poet feel better. They were written to share feelings and thoughts with other people, to shed some light on what is really happening in the world today, and what might happen, for better or worse, tomorrow.

I read 276 poems and chose the ones that seemed most true. Of course, there were entries that were hardly poems at all: angry remixes of news items cut up into rough lines of prose or forced into dogged rhyme. But there were also many real poets: people who actually read the work of the best poets of the past and present; poets from all over the world.

(For a picture of political poetry, mainly in Britain in the 20th century, may I recommend the anthology Red Sky at Night: socialist poetry, which Andy Croft and I edited for Five Leaves recently.)

These poems are not simply cries of pain, frustration and anger. The winning entry describes the agony of survivors and yet is beautiful because it is written with great care and love for the people in the poem and for the English language.

A poem written without love is bound to wither soon. So is a poem written simply out of fear or despair. Fear leads to bad actions. Despair leads to no action. Love is creative action and leads to good action. (I am 72 so I can do a short sermon once in a while.)

To generalise wildly, I would have liked more humour and wit. One way to fight the masters of war is with explosive jokes. But I’m not complaining. There were so many poems I enjoyed – many of them with passing references to dogs, I’m glad to say – that I have demanded four third prizes instead of two and have named 10 more poems as ‘highly commended’.

To all the poets, thank you. Please continue to work for peace in the streets and in your poems. Maybe you include the next Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda. But remember, poetry is not a competition. We are all in this together.

Red Pepper will publish the third-place poems in future issues. To access the Iraq Occupation Focus newsletter and to read about 5 December’s Occupation and Resistance in Iraq teach-in, visit www.iraqoccupationfocus.org.uk

The winner

Everything I know about war,

I see in Shairah’s face as she arrives

and kisses me one two three four five times,

this cheek, then that. Salaam Aleikum. How are you?

I’m fine. Wrenched to this winter, widowed after two

decades of invasion, she gets here early

for the food – white bread, tomatoes, chilli,

cheese, digestives, supermarket hummus,

or home-made halva, pistachios and spices,

a plate of Burmese noodles. Everything

I know is in the faces of these women

even when they smile, in their generosity,

in places language cannot reach. I see

fragments of their houses under fire

from bombers that are launched in Gloucestershire

above conservatories where people sip Darjeeling

out of willow-patterned china. Everything

I know about war, I know from the silence

after Marie cries J’ai pas la force,

J’ai pas le courage, when the lawyer’s letter

says she has no grounds to stay and must prepare

for deportation. Everything I know, I know

from sitting here with bags of baby-clothes,

from the Rwandan teenager who’s too shy

to speak, from the corner where Shareem prays

white-lipped in Ramadan for the Home Office

to relent, for a letter or a half-promise.

Everything I know, I know from the survivors,

Our lives are over, it’s the children now who matter.

No, there’s no official war in Yemen, just three guns

for every person, there’s no war in Afghanistan,

no war in Algeria, no war in Congo,

but on the battleground of female bodies. No,

there’s no war in Iraq, no war in Iran

where Azar has fled the politician-

husband who disabled her, but since gender

is not race, religion, nationality, member-

ship of a particular social group, or a political

opinion, she does not fit the bill.

Together we push war towards the edges,

for two hours drink tea in twenty languages,

distract the kids. But nothing rinses off

the memories – Suleika’s daughters locked

inside the engine-box because the man

she paid to bring them here insisted that

they had to be silent or die. Every-

thing I know remains when almost every-

one has left and Jedira who’s eight

with butterflies face-painted on her cheeks, says

Can I stay, can I stay please and sweep the floor?

by River Wolton

For safety and confidentiality, all names have been changed