Sadly, it hasn't gone away

Recently, I posted a poem on this blog called Letter to Vietnam which was inspired (this seems like the wrong word somehow in this context) by the murder of a very elderly Vietnamese man in Sydney in the early 1990s.

I think if we all examine our lives, our speech and our actions, it would only be the most saintly among us who could claim they never told a racist joke or thought a racist thought. But I believe most of us try our best to rise above the inherent racism which occurs in all races. White people are often singled out when the topic of racism is discussed, but, in reality, every race on this planet can be racist against another race, often their neighbours.

So, naturally, I was disturbed when I came upon the article below:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/6569704/Couple-set-their-dogs-on-Asians

It seems no matter how technologically advanced we've become, many of us have not advanced much beyond a caveman mentality. This may be unjust to cave people who, for all I know, may have been extremely tolerant and open-hearted people.

Tuesday Poem: "For Chrissie Weeping for the Sea"

You’re the one,

the nexus, the crux, the one at the centre

keeping all us flakes from

flaking off into a life more ordinary

and yet,

here you are, bursting into spontaneous tears,

the creep up behind you emotions,

the lump rising mid-word

and it’s not much to ask:

here, the poor people have a patch of the sea

not generally a city feature.

We walk our dogs, we surf our dreams and we contemplate.

We know the value of a dollar and the value of

turning your back on one.

And we’re a funny, fucked-up family

and our sea is our friend,

our plaything,

our solace and we’ll drive

one and a half hours

on special occasions

just to change our view of our sea

but we’ll always come back to our strip

of our sea

and we’ll stand and weep with our friend, Chrissie,

for the day they filled our sea with shit.




It seemed appropriate to post this poem since tomorrow is the first anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Christchurch and its infrastructure and killed 185 people. Raw sewerage filled our rivers and flowed out into the sea so that our beaches were deemed off-limits for about nine months.