A plug - and a word of explanation

I've just stuck a new poem on Frankenstina. I haven't written much recently - it's a bit like getting up early to go swimming: once you're in the way of it it seems somehow easier, more natural, but if you've stopped for a bit it seems a totally unlikely thing to do. This one, however, occupied me in a hospital waiting room, where I was merely the chauffeur and not really involved in the reason for the visit. The room was full, most of the time - a swirling mix of Glasgow humanity, some obviously suffering, some quiet and staring into space, some flustered because they'd missed their names for whatever reason. We in fact missed the name of my friend, but that was because we were talking - four people for one appointment is far too social to be serious.

But when I was left alone, I couldn't resist a bit of the furtive note-taking of the "accursed observer", as Edwin Morgan would have it, and as the time passed I found it taking shape as the poem. The title is partly in amused homage to an old friend, who used to talk about the time he had once spent in what he called the Suffering General, in the old days when all the hospital was contained in the Victorian building that now fronts a building site where the new Southern General is rising among the chaos. However, it also reinforces for me the universality of suffering, and how we are all, from the most self-contained to the most vocally expressive, reduced to the same state of helpless passivity in the hospital setting, and how we will all, one day, arrive at the terminus that for now I am happy to forget.

Now - on with the journey...

Thinking on Good Friday

Good Friday. A difficult day - what an understatement, really, if you think about it. Sun and sudden warmth, a fat bee raising clouds of pollen on the catkins which the blue tits had just vacated after a morning's swinging: all this life, this rebirth contrasts with the stark interior of the church, the bare altar, the cross alone in the middle of it, the brass eagle lectern lying as if in sorrow on the front pew ...

How often have I experienced this strangeness? I suppose for me it's maybe been 36 years since I sang the Reproaches in the Cathedral of The Isles, wondering at the mystery of it all; I can have missed perhaps one Good Friday service since then. And the strangeness is compounded, always, by the unheeding world down the hill, in the town, and nowadays in the online community. It used to upset me; perhaps it's something you just become used to because now I merely observe. And this year, as always, I thought of Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts, which points out that suffering is always going on somewhere, unnoticed by all but those most closely involved.

So today I'm thinking about suffering, and about all innocents who suffer despite - or maybe because of - their innocence.

Palestine, Israel and the Just War theory

How do we cope with the images coming from Gaza? I've just been looking at the guardian's photo gallery, where there is a striking photo of a woman weeping for 10 relatives killed in the Israeli air strike on the UN school yesterday. I cannot imagine how it must feel, such desolation. What is the reaction after the storm of grief? How are we to react?

The arithmetic is totally skewed: hundreds of dead compared to a handful of Israelis. The Palestinians have already lost so much at the hands of Israel, including a country where they were already living. Now they are herded into the margins, in a grim parody of Jewish ghettos and South African apartheid, cut off from the land their fathers farmed by walls and barbed wire. Does that weeping woman curse Hamas for firing the rockets that provoked this response? Or does she feel - if she has any feeling left - that this is the only possible thing to do in protest? But how do the relatives of the handful of dead Israelis feel? Obviously it's no better knowing that you're one of only half a dozen if it's your brother who is dead - so do they cheer on the troops who so outnmber the "insurgents" they are determined to crush? I am reminded of the days when, in my role as a CND activist, I spoke at the RCC in Edinburgh. In these days, much was made of the "Just War" theory. We were talking nukes then, but surely this is not a just war by any standards - let alone that of proportionate response.

And why do the rest of us seem to be letting this happen? We look at these dead children and wailing mourners, we see the abject poverty of the environment which is now being pounded to rubble, we watch doctors working in squalor to save lives as the drugs run out. A westernised power which we helped to plank in the middle of Palestine seems to have learned the worst possible lessons from its people's history and looks as if it is trying to eliminate the original inhabitants. What failure of imagination drives their leaders? These articulate and terrifying Israelis with American accents - what business have they there?

Daniel Barenboim, writing in the guardian last week, said this:

Palestinian violence torments Israelis and does not serve the Palestinian cause; Israeli retaliation is inhuman, immoral, and does not guarantee security. The destinies of the two peoples are inextricably linked, obliging them to live side by side. They have to decide if they want to make of this a blessing or a curse.

But until there is real justice for the wretched people of Palestine, it is hard to see how they can see any blessing in the proximity of their neighbours.