The Promise of Hiroshima

It was all so beautiful.

Mathematics could dissect reality itself,

Complex, and finely balanced,

A logan rock that moves with just a touch,

and through these mysteries

we came to understand

the energy constrained within a grain of sand.



Infinitesimal becomes

unbounded power.

One plane, one flash

One whole town gone to dust.

Nothing except a few skeletal lines

Some shadow where a man had been.

Silence, apart from screams.



For some, that was success.

And this is how it stays. We live

under the sword of Damocles

death dangling by a hair,

our fallibility denied.

We live beneath the constant threat,

our wilful ignorance of hell.



As if the sheer perfection of the science

could purge the politicians' faults.

As if the discipline

that led them to unlock the door

could somehow spread itself

into the corrupted soul and mind

of those whose stock in trade is lies.











(c) Richard Lawson

24/7/2015

A Wood in Somerset, Iraq

Back in 2003 I wrote this on the day that Blair and Bush started their disastrous invasion of Iraq. It cam third equal in a competition judged by the late great Adrian Mitchell. Once more, our enjoyment of our peaceful surroundings is contaminated by the bestial actions of men driven by the love of power.

 

A Wood in Somerset, Iraq

Stone still    in opalescent air

trees wait supportively.

Light   splinters on new leaves.

Sun for the seventh day

blesses an English spring.

Two thousand lives away

this anticyclone fires up a storm

that drowns a nightmare world

in ochre light.

The peace I feel

leaning against the powerful fist

that grips the earth, cushioned with moss,

back shaped, kind as an elephant,

finds its reflection in a furious world

of men who sleep walk,

fall on their mother's skin,

give screaming fire,

act and react,

but cannot take it in.

While birdsong fills my head,

sharp as the sunlight

sparking on those tiny points of green.

One hammer headed woodpecker,

knowing no better and no worse,

fires off his rounds.

I should be suffering,

but the world is folded at my side,

its front page images of death

have left off stirring

in this gentle air.

© Richard Lawson

27.3.03

Killing Spree Hypothesis: Kyrgyzstan, Bloody Sunday, Derrick Bird - and Trident

Here is an hypothesis that links the events in Kyrgyzstan, the Bloody Sunday killings, and Derrick Bird the Cumbria killer and Trident.

Some human beings,  in certain circumstances, once they have killed, will tend to proceed to repeat the act of killing. Once the human being steps out of the house of civilisation, once the sanction against killing has been bypassed, we go into a state of mind that seeks to repeat the experience. In extreme situations, it is common for people to go into a derealised state - a mode of consciousness where emotion is suspended. Most people who have been in a car accident go into this state. There is a feeling of calm in this state, and of detachment. The state of mind is well known. As a psychiatrist, I should know about the kinds of behaviour in this state, but I have to confess that I do not.




Some readers may find this hypothesis to be a mere truism. Others may well challenge me to produce evidence. And so I should. Manana. Research to be done. Someone has probably written a book about it already.

But if the hypothesis is anywhere near correct, it has a huge implication for nuclear weapons policy.  I have shown here that our Government's insistence on trying to cling on to its weapons of mass destruction, because there is no guarantee that they will not be used. The Killing Spree Hypothesis predicts that it is improbable that a limited nuclear exchange would stay limited. There is a high probability that if one goes up, they will all go up.

Marx once said that he would not want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The Club of nuclear weapons states - US, Russia, China, UK, France, Israel, Pakistan, India - all think they are sufficiently rational to sustain general nuclear deterrence without escalating to nuclear war. Just like junkies, who reckon they can handle it. They declare Iran and North Korea to be too irrational to be allowed to join the club. But in fact, they are all irrational humans, capable of kicking over the traces of civilisation. There is no binary rational / irrational categorisation of human individuals or of states of mind: rationality and irrational states of mind overlap, coexist, are arranged on a continuum.

Any regime that is sufficiently irrational  to think that it can create security on the basis of being able to threaten total insecurity is clearly unfit to be in possession of nuclear weapons.

The UK budget deficit, and the military review clearly provides an excellent time to look at the £70-100 billion cost of Trident. Now is the time for the British Government to provide firm international leadership, and call a conference of all nuclear weapons states with the intention of creating a nuclear free world.


It is a brilliant opportunity.

Except that Dr Liam Fox has taken Trident out of the defence review.

And we are just sitting hear, reading and writing, pushing ideas around. We should be out there demonstrating. I should be out there demonstrating. But I don't. I just sit here writing.


Maybe I'm derealised too. Maybe we all are, to a greater or lesser extent. In the words of the song,

We sleep not part but all our lives,
Times past are just a moving dream
Made by a self that is not I 
but one I was.



I wrote that.

I wrote this too:

RETURN

If we could see that endless point in time
when we shall know for certain that
our journey here has reached its final end

and in some way   reel in the flow of life
and from that soaring pinnacle
look back upon this state

when we  can live and  love
and walk and breathe and
sing and talk and eat and act

and then come back
remembering what we'd seen
no longer lost inside the crashing now

and now of world wave history
smashed in a broken compound eye
a shattered image of a breaking time

then with that timeless vision
we'd live each golden heartbeat
with such a fierce intensity

to drink the music of the  sky
study the winding ivy on the branch
feel the excitement of the water in the stream

dance to the rhythms of the wave
and learn to live in such a way
that joy is everywhere.
We covered a lot of ground here, but the underlying theme is that we need to not kill each other, because once the killing starts, it is hard to stop it. Nuclear deterrence is a kind of suspended killing spree, and the certainty of "nuclear deterrence" turning into Nuclear Terror is a value that appoaches unity with each year that passes. We have to get rid of nuclear weapons (and militarism generally) and we can get rid of nuclear weapons, because we - the nuclear nations - simply cannot afford the bloody things.

Unity’s all we ask and need

For Rudy Lewis
On April 1st, 2009, the British police, acting under orders, attacked peaceful demonstrators with batons, causing one death.


Have we, in some small way,
earned battle colours here?
We rainbow whites, greens, reds, browns
have faced the violence of the

ones clothed all in black,
caught in this clash between
provocateurs and servants of authority,
not of the people.

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

Will you now give us your hand
brothers, who have for centuries
suffered the baton blow, the whip lash
and stinging disrespect?

Will you extend to us
the hand of brotherhood,
we offering to you this token blood
that stains our faces, and the London streets?

To you, this was a passing slight,
You’ve been corralled for centuries, not hours
and we were beaten for our thoughts,
not for the colour of our skin.

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And will you, the ones the Nazis
kettled in Warsaw and worse
Auschwitz and Buchenwald
Will you now listen to our song?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And you, who live in terror of the Nazis’
victim’s sons, will you reach out to us
extend the hand of friendship for our wounds,
hear what we have to say?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And will you, yes our brothers
dressed in black, faces masked,
you with your shields and clubs
to use on undefended flesh,

Will you not start to question why,
Why are these voices to be blocked?
What are they calling for?
Why are these dreamers such a threat?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

© Richard Lawson
April 9, 2009

Genoa 2001

Cubic, fist sized
the black bloc offers
concrete poems
speaking violence to power

Phallic, rib cracking
the Law hacks out a harsh rejection slip
on sleeping forms
of those who fight
with dreams,
not rocks or clubs.

Twelve thousand years
evolved this final script,
prologue and epitaph
of primate history

(c) Richard Lawson
Languedoc
August 2001

Gaza poetry: Caught in the Crossfire

Caught In The Crossfire



Caught in the crossfire
crouching beside your father
behind the rubbish bin
until a slug untied the fragile knot
that held you in this dusty unkind world

you soared to paradise I'm sure
but paradise is often tainted
with anger dripped out from martyrs'
wounded souls

some scars don't heal

oh, we can give, and grieve
and hold each other
and hate, or block it out
or turn our minds to other things
but this is where we sit:

caught in the crossfire

Richard Lawson
Congresbury 2000

Goodbye George W Bush

---

Jail to the Thief

You flash your filthy flower, your red pustule
whose foul black winding sheet's your final word.

This is your moment of fulfilment,
your argument that cannot be denied,

since everyone who sees this rose of death
is forced to feel the hate that tortures you.

It echoes on and on in desolate triumph
a set of images caught in facing mirrors

trapped in a split infinity : hate, hurt,
hurt, hate, irrational regress, endless,

your wasted world, where nothing grows,
no bird sings, only a lacerating hate
that stains your too-committed consciousness,
the perfect canvas of your world, with blood of babes,

and us, the bystanders, no longer innocent,
spattered with hate.

We feel a surge of hate for you, and so it goes
over and even until death, which does not part us,

until the pity that we feel for your split victims
can grow and blossom into a piteous love that swells

to cover the whole world until it swallows even you,
you pitiful child-leader, engulfing you in

pain-struck, hate-contaminated love,
the leader who in some way we have allowed

through lifetimes of inattention, to speak and act for us,
to mouth these foul excrescences, these blasphemies
against the Life that bears us,
to speak these bombs on our behalf .

We powerless to pity you enough, rightly to pity your pain,
condemned to heal or share your nightmare

'til we die*.

© Richard Lawson
01:12hr 15 July 2006

*(Or until Obama takes over. Good luck Bro Barak)
PS Here's a link to video giving 8 years or Bush in 8 minutes

Gaza poetry: Nightmare in Gaza

One child's face, pale and still
pressed up against his mother's cheek,
cold and indifferent
to the blazing of her grief.

Cold as the war machine
that made this nightmare kill.

(c) Richard Lawson
19 Jan 2008

Mourning for Gaza (poetry)

I wrote the poem below when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, but the feeling still holds for today, with Israel's Government waging a shameful war on Hamas, killing children in the process.

We cannot be truly happy when atrocities are being carried out. I feel kind of numb this time. How can people be so stupid?

This is our chimpanzee nature coming out. Ironic that intelligent, technically sophisticated chimpanzees are solemnly conferring together to plan the best way of hurting the neighbouring chimpanzees. Doubly ironic that these alpha males both believe that the god who is driving them on in this madness is some kind of Universal Being. Wrong. The god that drives these men to murder is a psycho-social construct, a tribal fetish, and has no relation to the source of the universe or any kind of goodness.

Adrian Mitchell put this poem third in a competition organised by Iraq Occupation Focus and Red Pepper.



A Wood in Somerset, Iraq


Stone still in opalescent air
trees wait supportively.

Light splinters on new leaves.

Sun for the seventh day
blesses an English spring.

Two thousand lives away
this anticyclone fires up a storm
that drowns a nightmare world
in ochre light.

The peace I feel
leaning against the powerful fist
that grips the earth, cushioned with moss,
back shaped, kind as an elephant,

finds its reflection in a furious world
of men who sleep walk,
fall on their mother's skin,
give screaming fire,
act and react,
but cannot take it in.

While birdsong fills my head,
sharp as the sunlight
sparking on those tiny points of green.

One hammer headed woodpecker,
knowing no better and no worse,
fires off his rounds.

I should be suffering,
but the world is folded at my side,
its front page images of death
have left off stirring
in this gentle air.


© Richard Lawson
27.3.03

The Spite of Christmas Present

(Sorry if this one seems a bit dark, but it is the dark time of the year, and a lot of dark things are happening. If you can make it through to the end, it lightens up a bit. Happy Christmas. Remember that in WWI German and English soldiers played football together, until the officers banned it).


Part 1

“God bless us every one”
said Tiny Tim.
Scrooge begged,
“Spirit, don’t let his place be empty”
God said,
“Go forth and multiply.”

And the result: his corner of the room
packed out with Tiny Tims
on this and every Christmas
waving their crutches.
Look how their stumps kick out
no longer weighted down by feet.

Look how the masters of the blast that
ran away with their mobility
gaze on the symbols of the Nazarene,

and now we know that Odin
was not enclosed
in this or any other tree
to any useful purpose
and is remembered more for
thunderbolts than sacrifice,

and now we know the babe of Bethlehem
raises a wail
that sounds to us like sirens,
sounds like the screech of Bedlam.

And now professors sing,
“We cast out demons in your name,
They came to rest in us.
We did not know.
Forgive our trespasses
and give us now this day our daily wad
beseeching thee for alms
that armourers may live
to buy the sword and not to die
unto the death
for ever and ever
arm all our men.
Arm men.”

Part 2

We know the meek
will walk the worst of worlds
inheriting a wasted earth
the poor will just die young,
whereas some rich
will splatter on the pavement
underneath their towers
with rasp-brain jelly,
while others will survive
under the bright lights
broadcasting their folly to a world
no longer watching.

The truth will out:
out in the darkness
out of sight and
out of mind
out the damned truth.

And after Babylon has gone
the truth will not survive
not in our brain
not in our hearts or minds
no light, no truth
no righteousness
only a dark oblivion,
or so they say.

Do not look for light
here at this time of year.
We celebrate the death of life
the death of light,
and the demise of truth
and consciousness
no love no light no life
except in a soon rebirth.

No rhythm to our lives
no sun to rise and set
the seasons are all lost to us,
no winter snow
no frost.
Nature is all held back
all gone.




We’ll lock ourselves into this cell
until the fortresses of our imagination
come tumbling down
transformed.

What does it matter
if the broken heart
should pour out grief
not just in salty drops
but in an offering of words
that everyone can recognise
world wide and for all time?

Or that in music
rich formulae
rivers, cascades and
palaces of sound are raised
like forests holding up their arms
for all eternity?

Or that cathedrals could be carved
from carcasses of innumerable diatoms
under an ancient sea
hardened in the hold of time
carved in mathematic tracery
and that they fall when chemistry
is married with stupidity and hate?

God blast us every one!
a landmine now for every leg
for every brain a bullet
and for the poor,

a sharp machete blade.




(c) Richard Lawson
Bristol Park Street
22.12.2005

A Thought

There are no playful porpoises
in the tragic Caucasus;
what we have before us is
a brawl of brontosauruses.

(c) Richard Lawson
21.8.08

Iraqi trial acquittal

Occupation : Jobbing Squaddie

It's what we're trained to do, it's just our job.

If jumped up Hitlers want to get tooled out

with nukes and gas and germs that they can lob

at us, we'll bring them down, no fuckin doubt.

It wasn't so much warfare as a rout.

The worst our unit faced was sand and heat.

Talk about open doors - if we got out

to piss, they'd stick their hands up. They were beat.

It wasn't really such a major feat,

it's just our job, it's what we're trained to do.

First they were friendly, nice as you could meet.

We all relaxed. Nobody had a clue

how it would all go sour. Nobody knew

exactly when we overstayed our leave,

but when a roadside bomb took out our crew

I got the first faint sus we'd been deceived.

We didn't mind the looters and the thieves

we're trained for that, it's all part of the job.

The thing that always makes my stomach heave

is facing down a screaming angry mob.

Stones hurt, bottles can burn, but when they gob

and spit at you, that is the thing...

we sweated blood to save the fuckwit yob

who's screaming hate at you...it's that what stings.

We chased and caught them. Some one brings

them back inside the compound walls.

I heard our sarge say "Make them sing".

We laid in with our toecaps on their balls.

We got court martialled. Told us all to crawl.

Told us what not to say, gave us a gag.

They called it torture. I say we lost our rag.

We'll pay with years for one five minute brawl.

What stupid bastard sent us to this war?

How is this supposed to help the British nation?

They lied to us - we're here for Bush's oil.

No paddle in a shit-creek situation.

Two years have passed since liberation.

There were no WMD. That lying slob

Blair, he fouled up. This is an occupation.

He should jailed, not us. It's not our job.

(c) Richard Lawson 28.5.05

Yippee!!

Not often an e-mail provokes this response, but A Wood in Somerset, Iraq has just been nominated third prize in the Iraq Occupation Focus/Red Pepper Poetry Competition . Invited to read it up in London next Sunday, which I will indeed do for reasons of ego-massage, although I would always prefer to be in a wood in the country than up in the Big Smoke. Yer tiz, the poem:

A WOOD IN SOMERSET, IRAQ


Stone still in opalescent air
trees wait supportively

light splinters on new leaves.

Sun for the seventh day
blesses an English spring.

Two thousand lives away
this anticyclone fires up a storm
that drowns a nightmare world
in ochre light

The peace I feel
leaning against the powerful fist
that grips the earth, cushioned with moss
back shaped, kind as an elephant,

finds its reflection in a furious world
of men who sleep walk,
fall on their mother's skin,
give screaming fire,
act and react,
but cannot take it in

while birdsong fills my head
sharp as the sunlight
sparking on those tiny points of green.

One hammer headed woodpecker,
knowing no better and no worse
fires off his rounds.

I should be suffering
but the world is folded at my side,
its front page images of death
have left off stirring
in this gentle air.


© Richard Lawson
27.3.03

Thank you for reading right down to the bottom. Not everyone can do this.