Poetry Diary featuring a poem by Abeer Ameer

By Kim Moore

The ‘poetry’ part of my poetry diary is looking a little thin since the last time I posted. I’m still in the throes of the summer holidays, which has meant lots of trips to places a five year old might be amused by, and less time for poetry and related activities.

I have met some of my MA students for supervision of their final dissertations and also one of my private mentees. These meetings are a real joy - time spent talking with people about their poetry. More and more I’m convinced that the true magic of learning or growing or developing - whatever we want to call it, happens in conversations, in listening, in the back and forth exchange of energy and ideas rather than me sitting and holding forth on what I think about line breaks or imagery. So I have had a chance to do that in the last week or so.

We also had the reading for David Tait last night at The Bookcase in Hebden Bridge. The bookshop was packed full of poets and it was lovely to see so many familiar faces. We have cleverly called it the ‘Pop Up Poetry Night’ leaving us free to ‘pop up’ whenever we feel like it, rather than having to commit to something each month.

Tomorrow I’m on leave from both my university job, and my freelance work until September. I’m determined to be strict with myself this year and take a proper break, and hopefully come back refreshed and ready to go for the autumn term. The out of office is officially on - well it will be starting at 9am tomorrow.

So I won’t be posting any posts here for the next few weeks although Clare Shaw may appear with a post (or may not - that’s part of the excitement!) I wanted to leave you with another poem by a brilliant poet and friend of mine Abeer Ameer.

Abeer’s debut collection Inhale/Exile is available from Seren here. Her poems have appeared widely in print and online journals and anthologies including Acumen, Poetry Wales, Planet, Magma, Red Poets, New Welsh Reader, Prole, The High Window, Atrium, The Rialto and Long Poem Magazine. She is a recipient of the Literature Wales Mentoring Scheme for 2020.

Abeer posted a video of herself reading this and I asked if I could post the text of the poem here. It felt particularly apt after the week we’ve had in Britain - the riots, the racism, the violence that has been shown on our screens or felt in the streets.

The poem starts with ‘They say’ - but who are the ‘they’? The poem never tells us - but the ‘they’ say what they say with their words and their actions - they say that ‘some lives are worth less than other lives’. It is too easy to say the ‘they’ are the government, the ‘they’ are also society, the people we live and work with, the people we overhear talking on the bus or in the pub and pretend we don’t hear them. This is a ‘they’ that perhaps many of us are complicit in somehow.

There is also a wonderful trick in the language here - we read over and over ‘worth less’ but our brains and our hearts hear and feel ‘worthless’. It is not just that some lives are worth less, some lives are worthless. But this transformation doesn’t really happen until the final stanza, and when it does, it feels like a key slotting into a lock. It feels almost like relief, as obscene as it is, because that is what we have been hearing and thinking all this time.

The second stanza starts to unpack how this might be so with the strange logic of power and government - that if a life arrives ‘hungry, soaked to the bone’ then of course they are worth less. In this poem, in the logic of this power structure, fleeing barbed wire fences, being born into iron chains, who speak with a tongue from afar, those with calloused hand, those who walk barefoot, those who have been traumatised by what they see are all worth less. Are all worthless, despite these things being things they cannot control.

This is a blistering poem that is full of controlled anger and deserves a place in future anthologies of war, of refuge, anthologies of political poetry, anthologies about love, because what act of love is more radical than to truly believe that all lives are worth the same, that a stranger’s life is worth the same as the person you love most in the world? And if we could believe this, then what radical acts of love and care could we let loose in the world, what changes could we make?

Abeer is writing and recording poems on her Youtube channel at the moment which seek to document the horrors of the war and terror in Gaza. You can find her channel here.

Thank you all for reading, and see you in a couple of weeks!

WORTH
ABEER AMEER They say with all they say and do that some lives are worth less than other lives. That although all people are born equal, some are just worth less than others. It may be how they got here that made them worth less – if they were hungry, soaked to the bone in seawater, clearly they are worth less – worth less than those always well-fed, worth less than those who tread upon red carpets. Those born into iron chains are worth less than those wearing gold chains, worth less than those fed from silver spoons. Those who flee barbed wire fences are worth less than those who pen boundaries. They are worth less than those who stamp forelocks, are worth less than those with keys to castles. Those who speak tongues from afar are worth less than speakers of fairer tongues. Those with calloused hands are worth less than those with soft hands. Those who walk barefoot are worth less. Those whose sight has been scarred are worth less. Those whose minds are pained are worth less. Those with untamed spines are worth less. Those outside Flanders Fields are worth less. Those from the east of the West are worth less. Those in the West first are worth less. They say those whose lives are worth less shouldn’t complain. They should accept it as their fate, their destiny. This is life. Some lives are worth less than other lives. Some lives are worth less than others. Some lives are worth less. Worth less. Worthless.