Strange fruit cocktails: Racists and love poems

(Strange rebirths…)

There has been a fair amount of articles about racism lately, in the various international newspapers. From Republican politicians sending out ‘magic negro’ CDs, to British princes calling people their ‘Paki mates’; from the New York Post and its Obama Apegate, to the Pope’s (somewhat unsurprising) love affair with Holocaust deniers. All in all, it has been a less than delightful smorgasbord of more or less random nastiness and I have to admit that I am heartily sick of it.

Reading all that stuff can make the brain turn on itself, with bits on the right side snarling at and taking bites of bits on the left hand side and vice versa, till you become so stupid with frustrated and angry boredom that you start to foam round the mouth and shout at your computer screen.

It also makes me entertain quite violent thoughts about all types of racists. That it would be nice, for instance, if they could simply go back to where they came from, evolutionary speaking. That is, swinging from trees - or, failing that, to be hung from them.

Not nice, I know but the world would be a much better place if people like that would, as that old song has it, become ’strange fruit.’

It would be even better, of course, if you could do real magic and change each and every boring, brain-dead bigot into a love poem. One firm hit over the head with a magic wand (or cudgel) and, let’s say, that bishop that claims that there were no gas chambers in the German concentration camps was reborn or remade into this lovely Jane Hirshfield poem...:

"See how the roads are strewn
white,
as if your hand, traveling my body,
came to be that flock of blossoms,
scent of February in the dark.
See how my hips eclipse your hips,
how the moon, huge as a grain-barge, passes by.
And promises do not hold,
certainties do not hold,
the risen cries fall and fail to hold,
but my body, confusion of crossings, I give you
broadcast, to move with your hand,
where nothing is saved but breaks out in a thousand directions,
armful of wild plum, weeds."

... and what better way to deal with the Pope who gives his blessing to Holocaust deniers than to remake him in the image of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet LXXXl:

"And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all."

Yes, as make-over shows go, turning hateful trolls into love poems takes some beating - and we could even expand the field, by including politicians and other perverse pests.

Wouldn’t it have been fun if we could have changed George Bush in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock…’

or Tony Blair into Frederico García Lorca’s ‘Before The Dawn…’

or Robert Mugabe into W.H. Auden’s ‘O Tell MeThe Truth About Love…’

or Vladimir Putin into Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘To Say Before Going To Sleep...’

and all the world’s bankers and hedge funds managers into Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover beach…?‘

Plus, as a last and most impressive magic trick, we would change the whole damn, European Commission, the UN’s Human Rights Commission, the British parliament, the US Senate & Congress and, just for fun, the British Cricket Board, Pamela Anderson’s fake tits and all ABBA songs and Dan Brown novels into this one short, yet hauntingly beautiful Robert Graves poem:

"She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow."