Writing What Must Be Written

It was that day again, that creative writing workshop day. I always intend to get myself sorted and not leave things until the last minute, but last minute it was. It was perhaps a more serious time of writing. Armistice Day didn’t lend itself to the trivial and banal we usually head for. War and peace are serious issues.

The first task was met with grunts and grumbles that when my friend Tim leads the session he doesn’t give them impossible tasks to do. Just how do you describe the colour ‘red’ by not using the word ‘red’? I gave us a rainbow and said describe it without using the rainbow’s colours. It was interesting that many of us couldn’t remember the Richard-Of-York-Gained-Battles-In-Vain mnemonic to remind us what colours we were dealing with. Here are mine =

Rainbow Colours

A poppy on this day worn on a lapel

Cold cheeks on a winter morning

Shoes of some colour on a dancer that could not stop dancing

Round, sweet and sticky with juice

Sunset or sunrise painted across the sky

Too many carrots turn the skin from its pinkness

Bananas fresh picked in bunches

Sun and sand

Forests and ferns

Leaves and grass

In a million shades

Summer sky empty of cloud

Sea and

Far off mountains

Squid ink

Small flowers

Parma sweets

Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes

There was a lot of chewing of pencils. All the colours? Yes, all the colours.

It comes to me at times that I don’t always share the same reference points as other people. I first came across this when I talked about parables in class one day and I faced a room of blank faces. This time it was about the song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ I’d found a YouTube clip but did not find my wee gizmo speaker. I sang it instead – yes, me singing, sufficient to clear the room. We talked about anti-war songs and about the loss that comes from war. We had a choice to write about war or about peace. Here’s mine –

War’s End

The storm passes,

the guns are silent.

the sun rises new,

No throat-choking smoke.

Bricks placed one upon another,

sealed with cement -

time to build,

destruction done with.

Forgiveness will come one day

and we say, ‘No more war.’

What a forgetful race

we are.

I’d been talking earlier to Joe about after class and going for lunch. I wanted to avoid the town centre. I wanted specifically to avoid the table with all the ‘Support for Israel’ people and pamphlets. I think, with Armistice, and a pro-Palestinian rally they chose not to set out their wares. I want ‘bricks placed one upon another/sealed with cement -/time to build’ so badly. I am done with the hundreds of thousands dead who are not soldiers, not armed, not choosing a battlefield. War destroys. I had in my mind a Jesus-over-turning-tables moment if they had been there. I couldn’t promise Joe, or promise God that I wouldn’t.

I’d been asked earlier in the week if we could write something about the ‘Votes for Women’ marches. Later on in the afternoon, the Bike Shed was hosting a celebration of a march in Edinburgh a number of years ago and one hundred banners on display. The Inverness banner and the Ullapool banner were to be mounted on the wall and a short talk and video presentation were planned. If we wished to share our stories or poems we were most welcome. Here’s mine. It wasn’t written as a poem, but a poem was in there waiting in the wings.

Passing on the Baton

Does it work,

this marching business,

this online petition that

generates a thousand signatures?

Does it change anything?

It changes me.

It pushes back the boundaries of

the world I inhabit,

the world outside my home

beyond my waking,

stretching, washing, dressing and eating.

I live in my freedoms

because someone else marched for them,

someone else signed a petition

But did it change anything?

Not overnight.

The best changes don’t happen overnight.

Think of tree leaves -

on a morning waking,

their leaves are not suddenly

brown or yellow,

rust or red.

It’s a process.

And every process has a starting point.

Injustice witnessed is a starting point.

The baton has been passed.

I feel it in my head, in my heart

and in my hand.

Injustice is still the starting point.

Maybe there’s a generation

on my heels that

will, because I marched,

because I signed a petition,

be more free than I am.

I went back after lunch because I’d been asked to go. I shared the poem, along with the piece my husband wrote. Do you know there were ‘suffragettes in trousers’? In the day and age of the marches, women didn’t wear trousers. It wasn’t, for want of a better word, permitted. The suffragettes in trousers were the men that walked with them. I want to say for the record that my husband walks with me. He supports me in all I do. I possibly wouldn’t do what I do without his encouragement.

It has been an intense day. What has been written has been written and what was written was profound. There are some things that just need to be written down. Today was that kind of day.