Jun 2021 – Down with that!

This evening’s session on ‘Protest’ went ahead despite the Home Secretary seeking to ban it.

In ‘Incendiary’, Vernon Scannell protests about the neglect that led to a child’s inflammatory protest.

Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ is an outraged protest against the ferocious treatment of a peaceful pro-democracy rally. It inspired ‘The Mask of Anarchy 2020’, elsewhere on this site.

We heard poems by two Palestinian poets; Khaled Juma’s heart-breaking ‘Gaza’, and Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Psalm 3’ expressing the imperative to protest. Michael Rosen admirably adheres to this. We heard his ‘I sometimes fear’, but did not have time for his ‘In Gaza’ and ‘Don’t mention the children’ about Palestine, or any of his protests about our present test-obsessed education system.

In ‘The Schoolboy’, Blake protests against the prison of the classroom in summertime.

Ilya Kaminsky’s ‘We lived happily during the war’ expresses shame at not having protested more, while Langston Hughes in ‘Evil’ is determined to persist.

David gave us an impassioned a capella performance of Woody Guthrie’s ‘Vigilante Man’ about the harassment and indeed murder of refugees from the Dust Bowl. The imagery of Abel Meeropol’s famous song ‘Strange Fruit’ retains its fierce power when read.

The plight of refugees was also addressed in Brian Bilston’s ‘Penguins’. We had the same poet’s hilarious ‘How much I dislike the Daily Mail’ and ‘Revolution Inc’.

In Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Weak bladder blues’ the poet tries to turn his suffering into boasting. His ‘Come on everybody’ excoriates the bourgeois, who will go to Bournemouth when they die.

Tony Harrison in ‘National Trust’ protests about the power of the bourgeois class to silence the workers. But in June Jordan’s ‘Song for Soweto’, the oppressors’ efforts to control the language of a young girl are doomed to fail.

In Ken Gambles’ ‘Train of Thought’ the poet protests at the gratuitous flattening of an unfortunate spider.

Wendy Cope is not impressed by ‘Men and their boring arguments’.

Our final protest expressed, in Gerald Manley Hopkins’s unique style, despair at the felling the ‘Binsey poplars’.

Satisfied, we took our placards home, to be re-purposed for the next protest.