Bird - Ruth Murphy

I fly.
I soar and swoop.
I can walk, I can sing,
But even people do that.
I fly.

Autumn - Ruth Murphy

The rain is planting cold kisses on the soil,
shocking it awake.
this is not a pleasant
cockerel crowing dawning.
It is not soft and mollycoddled in mist
nor bright with sunshine diamonding the dew.
It is just dripping cold,
drip, drip,
each drop a cold shock
to a world so recently wrapped in warmth.

Audacity - Ruth Murphy

I had a question for God.
I had a question for the one
who placed the sun just so
in the big blue arch of the sky,
who dotted the stars
mystically about the heavens.
I had a question for God.
I had a question for the one
who rocks and swells the sea
on its primeval bed,
who brings back the seasons,
shy from their hideaway.
I had a question for God.
A question from one
who was born naked and screaming
into the human race,
who is proud to be gazing
at the stars and wondering,
underneath the sun that
rises and sets,
watching as the seasons turn,
assuming that they always will.
I had a question for God.
I had a question,
and God would answer if He was there.
Are you there God?
Are you there?
Above the horizon,
opposite the setting sun,
a single star.
The smell of summer
on the edge of the breeze.
The sky grows dark,
the stars come out.
I am waiting for an answer.
I had a question for God.
I had a question
and God would have answered
If He were there.

All the Colours of the Rainbow - Ruth Murphy

I love you.
You are all the colours of the rainbow to me.
You are black and white,
day and night,
you are the summer sun
and the pale frosted pastel
of a winter dawn.
You are mist and sunlight,
dew and starlight,
you are the winter dark
that turns my brain
in spiralling circles close to madness,
you are the warmth of summer
breathing life into my brain
and strength to my heart.
I love you.
You are my mind
and my madness,
you are my new-found everything.

[I'm intending to publish a few of Ruth's poems here over the next few months on an entirely ad hoc basis. I hope you enjoy them.]

Abu Mazen's exit

Mahmoud Abbas has been a partnerless advocate of a negotiated settlement in the Middle East for years now, but having been left in the cold by Israel he began to look impossibly compromised.

In losing Abbas, Israel will certainly be losing the best hope of being able to negotiate a secure and sustainable solution to the conflict, but that is lower on their agenda now than it has perhaps ever been. They may in fact view his departure as a bit of a gift.

Still, if the Israelis are intent on creating facts on the ground, Palestinians can do likewise. This is not limited to violent resistance, and it does not require a retreat. The international community should encourage and support a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within 1967 borders, and if Salam Fayyad makes this his position it would surely be difficult for anyone except the U.S. to resist the manifest equivalence of this position to that of the Israelis.

It may bolster Hamas in the short term, because some would certainly see this as a surrender. But a unilateral declaration in no way undermines previous UN resolutions that give Palestinians their legal cause, it in no way dilutes the claim to refugee right of return, and it places the onus on Israel to actually wrest East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements from the Palestinians.

Surely that wouldn't be allowed to stand?

Red poppies: a political statement?

What a tricky question.

On the one hand, for most people, it is not. Statements are heard precisely in so much as they stand out against the background noise of the status quo. In that sense, at least, it is not a statement.

Indeed, many people wearing red poppies will be against many of the specific military ventures in which Britain has and is engaged. They view Remembrance as simply that.

On the other hand, precisely in so much as it isn't heard as a statement that is exactly what it is: a statement of unity, of unanimity in many offices, churches and communities, in which the totem is the same even if its connotations are different.

That this is a form of statement is thrown into relief when such unanimity is impossible to assert, such as in Northern Ireland where the poppy became associated with Loyalism. Here the poppy and the flag are inseparable. The question is, are they ever?

The point for me is that those who wear the white poppy are often accused of making a political point on the back of an apolitical event. But for as long as people are still dying as a result of the system that they oppose, it's difficult to imagine how wearing a symbol so deeply embedded in the military economy can be acceptable to them.

Others' hostility to this betrays a totalising tendency among those who would prefer that, for one day, the monologue is unchallenged. This, in itself, is a reason to opt for the white poppy.