Phenomenal Healthstyle

I have been invited to write a weekly column for Phenomenal Healthstyle.
My first article was published today. Please follow the link and leave a comment there.
Phenomenal Healthstyle

Peace
Sloetry

A Poem, A Prayer

Dear Lord

As I seek to grow in your Love & Faith,

And find spirituality and goodness in the world around me.

Let me learn from the humble, the meek and the peacemakers.

Let me learn of your greatness in however you are,

Male or Female, in your Godly form

Or Nature’s spirits

Of ancestors or Mother Earth.

Let me question those who would bring me man’s truth

And not Your own.

Let my ears be closed to those whose church spread the globe

Because they had invented sail and musket.

Or branded darker skin on Caribbean plantations,

Carving up the continent which birthed humanity.

Let me beware of those who fought wars in your name,

And represent you through uniforms in church

That honour parade grounds and institutionalised pain,

Yet they teach me your Son was of absolute peace.

Let me learn of churches and faiths closer to you

Whose meaning has been trodden by centuries of oppression

And devalued to labels of evil by those who do not now dwell in heaven.

Teach me of churches carved in rock in East Africa,

Of indigenous spirituality stripped from my own people

That still blesses those who have been divided and ruled

But whose Faith is maintained.

For whatever form is your Great Mystery,

Let me learn to live my life by your Divine teachings,

And not by those who would describe your Son

As the same colour as my light self.

I seek your Truth, your Wisdom, your Guidance,

From You and your Disciples

Wherever they should be found.

Amen.

Fear Not

Fear defies the laws of physics.

Its perpetual energy

Starts at the most gentle of nudges,

Becoming a raging torrent

That sweeps the owner

Into an abyss of fragility.

A brain wired to always

Think the worst scenario

Entertains this downward spiral

Into dysfunction.

Let our minds switch.

Let lonely thoughts

Ramble to possibility and hope

With faster rhythms than negativity.

May peace finds its way to the hardest heart,

And positivity bless as the truth.

Let the mind be the cure,

And not the disease.

One drop of rain does not imply a storm.

It is simply water, the life giver. 

Haiti Remembered, a year on

God bless the people of Haiti. A year tomorrow since.

A year ago I lay alone.

Prone

On a Birmingham hotel bed.

I thought of the dead,

The dying

The living, the crying.

I won’t deny my eyes watered

For trapped sons and daughters.

The news channel delivered to me,

First reports of an earthquake in Haiti.

A country born from fight,

A flag made once ripped out the white

From the Tricolour.

No room for the defeated oppressor’s colour.

And yet a nation still miles from home.

Kings and Queens from ancestral homes.

The strength of people

Who had delivered themselves from evil.

A dagger through the imperial heart.

Even Napolean had been Blownapart. 

And don’t allow the French Connection

To let England hide it’s intended direction.

Abolition of the holocaust trade

Had economic reasons made

From Hispaniola’s wealthy curse.

Britain simply wanted to bankrupt the French purse.

But the war never really ended.

The West’s ego was still offended.

A worldwide conspiracy to make them pay,

Debt still owed from an enslaved day.

External influences, the european tool,

Always success through divide and rule.

Then nature raised it’s sword and slashed,

As if hurricanes hadn’t been enough.

My emotions raw at the news,

And yet my donations were abused,

Crates sat on runways,

No one digging dust from airways

Choked behind crushed doors.

Cardboard beds on hospital floors,

And the D.E.C.

Sucked D.I.C.

Today, foreign intervention,

Whatever the intention

Has sky high’d rent.

So even more are living in tents.

Aid workers there assisting,

Are causing eviction.

The media a year on in this nation…

I’m just seeing photographers on vacation.

Roll up for a tragedy pose

As life Flickr’s out with shots of toes

Curled from cholera’s grip.

How much more of this shit.

Does Haiti have to take?

The UN not protecting girls from rape.

Instead bringing in disease.

Is the cure only in keeping things clean?

I don’t know about you.

I was innoculated at school.

And still money sits and waits.

While someone earns interest from unopened crates.

Europeans rush to adopt kids like vultures

So keen to bring them up in alien cultures.

Fuck your wealth to import children.

Instead pay a family to construct a home, a building,

And stop taking from mothers whose womb has birthed

On a Caribbean island, their African earth.

I don’t doubt the resolve of this nation.

History hasn’t yet defeated a Haitian.

Let the mirror show where lies the sin.

Reflect what will be, and what has been.

Colour Barrier

Truth is I see colour.

It’s something I don’t want to see,

But until the scales of equality balance

I have to see difference.

You see, I see white everywhere.

In “multi-cultured” institutions

I see white at the helm.

Government, police and judiciary.

Media, finance and industry.

From capitalism to capital punishment,

And yes, in my mirror…

I see white.

In the language used,

I’ve had to undo years of being fed

That good comes in white packages,

Yet the Messiah Himself was not.

So let me say as a Christian,

Hallelujah, I see the dark and it is good.

Language warped, as my church has been,

To justify a Passage… not of scriptures,

But of the Middle of the Atlantic,

As African bones line the floor of an ocean,

That created a diaspora away from home,

As the church preached

White was right.

I untangle expressions like "black day"

Into a positive 24 hour period.

Frankly it’s white I see in evil power,

So I won’t indoctrinate my children

To form their mouths into first words

Of a treacherous euro babble.

The seeds of racism grow

In the unconscious mind.

So I will be awake to race,

Colour, creed and faith.

To ask me not to see colour

Ignores the legacy of my white face.

Interview

I was blessed to receive my first ever interview (thanks to Naomi)

http://cursesandriots.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/keep-learning-an-interview-with-photographer-rob-covell/

Roots Manouver

Roots Manouver

Is it morris dancing

Or kids prancing

To heavy metal, banging heads?

Is it skinheads

Or bowing to the Queen?

The Union Jack that once dominated the world scene.

Singing Rule Brittania at the Proms,

And no one thinking its wrong.

Love of a pre-war "white" England.

Ruling with pain but claiming it as Jerusalem.

Stiff upper lip and stifling all emotions.

Transporting Africans across the Atlantic ocean.

Forcing guilt on the defeated, for the victor the spoils.

Ruling in God's name, justifying slaves' toil.

Muttering under breath at the sight of darker skin.

Saying one thing. Thinking another within.

Writing history books for the self-righteous.

Murdering those whose truth is contagious.

Justifying a system of wealth,

Its ok, cos poverty happens to someone else.

Thinking superiority over all other people,

At the same time claiming that everyone is equal.

Seeing suffering as something Africans are used to,

Only when it's British deaths is the pain perceived as true.

Black deaths in detention.

And no one giving it a mention.

And people ask me why...

How easy is it for me to defy

My ancestral line,

And stand for a revolution not seen as mine?

Read all the above again.

You want me to trust English white men?

Photography

I wouldn't normally post my photography on my poetry blog, but I'm just so pleased with this latest set that....well it's all poetry to me, and the model is a world renowned poet!!

2 four letter words

If

Love

Were

A Poem.

She’d

Have

Been

Written,

By

You

Leamington Spa Station

For those who lovingly suggest I diversify my poetry portfolio... here's 2 things I wrote while traveling home from working on location today.

Leamington Spa Station 

Poem 1

It’s the usual poet’s poem…

Sat at a station.

I’m cold.

Trying to think

Of something profound to write.

I can’t.

(then I perchanced to look upon the ground)….

Poem 2

The station’s concrete floor

Seems to have set.

But while wet,

A dog must have trespassed.

Now her legacy imprints platform 3.

The fast train to Marylebone

Sits and waits.

Blank stairs oblivious…

But I noticed.

I wish I had my camera.

Hold On

Hold On
by
Sloetry

Cuffs tighten on shaking wrists.

Tears drip off trembling lips.

Feet bondaged in metal chains,

That lead to arms, neck, and down again.

Whips and sticks beat heads to pulp.

Women and children scream for help.

Tropical heat in free air, breathes ice cold,

Compared with death, stench and suffocating oven of the hold.

90 days of swirling ocean.

Home gone. To hell in motion.

Vomit and faeces between toes whose worth

Once embraced the love of African earth.

Some hold breath

To cheat with death.
Head injuries self-inflicted,

Rather die than be constricted

In sailing ships from slave stations,

Filling holds to alien nations.

Cuffs tighten on desperate wrists.

Fear stutters from bruised lips.

Feet flail and pound van doors.

Blooded noses crack onto floors.

Batons rain on heads to pulp.

Panic induced cries for help.

African faces distorted against floors of cold.

Uniforms pile on top to secure the hold.

Minutes seem like hours in a struggle for life.

Metal eating into flesh, cuts like a knife.

Bodies clench in death throws,

Buffeting sideways to escape the blows.

Weight bears down on prone spines

Lungs expel air, feared for the last time.

Head injuries inflicted, its black and blue.

Longing for mothers slips to unconscious view.

Four wheeled ships as transportation.

Filling holds in alien nations.

Body Beautiful

The camera never lies?
But who and how you take
Predetermines results,
And photoshop fakes.

Like freedom... It’s said
You get answers in a free society
But the control comes from
The questions you’re fed.

I’m told that beauty’s norm
Is blonde and blue eyed
Sized 8 and no muscle.
The “gorgeous” weakened form.

Females encouraged to be the fairer sex,
Frail enough not to resist
And be down trodden
From anything males suggest.

Paleness so revered yet salons
And beach leaches
Risk skin disease
Just to get a tan on.

For those who's skin goes
Red from suns rays,
A darkening cream perhaps...
You know, when you’ve been Tango’d.

Please excuse my disquiet,
But there’s nothing
Appealing in a no body
Coming from a yoyo diet.

The female schism...
Is thin and fat debates
Get the attention,
What of health and athleticism?

Venus and Serena...
Europeans love to mock
Their form as manlike,
But it’s a no brainer.

Healthy norms
Ridiculed by those
Who can’t look in mirrors
To face their own form.

Feared empowerment.
Let strength be a facet
Of femininity,
Not the butt of comedians.

Female suppression
As God’s words are manifested
By men
And female circumcision.

Too many rapes unchecked,
From bars and clubs
To Congolese villages
That the UN uninspect.

Where “No” in multi-languages
Is the most understood
Yet least heard word,
As men force fuck anguish.

There’s no escape.
And still society
Beautifies stick women
Who can’t fight off rape.

And me a man.
I’ll not define
What is the beauty
Of woman.

But I’ll fight
Those that debeautify
Her true essence
To diminish her might.

European children nullify the form,
Yet they forget
It was from an African womb
That they and humanity were born.

Adoption

1st draft of a piece that came to me this morning, following a TV programme last night on chidren from Haiti (many with parents) being adopted by French people

Adoption

Let me deny your parents

The resources to care for you,

Even though I could support them

If I really wanted too.

Let me imagine your voodoo evil

Was not your West African heritage,

And baptise you into the religion that

Enslaved your people.

Let me change your name

And indoctrinate your young mind

That white is the colour of your saving grace,

Yet your ancestors had to fight us in the first place.

Let me talk to your mother

To understand your loves and wants,

And watch her cry as I prise you

From her loving hugs.

Let me justify my need for offspring

Of a fashionable colour.

I’ll look so good in my community

As other white people stop to talk to me.

Let me touch your beautiful hair that I’m seeing.

We’ll laugh together as I try to pass

An afro comb through mine that’s fair,

Or maybe I’ll just make yours resemble European.

I can teach you of your culture,

While you live in mine.

I’ll teach you to treat all as equal

But you’ll be special, not like other black people.

Let me be that band aid for your happiness

And let wounds fester

As I put my needs first

And ignore solutions that could be better.

Come here my child.

Dry your tears and be loved.

Welcome to your new western nation.

Let’s pretend you’re not black and Haitian.

Mother land

Mother land

by

Sloetry

Many years ago

My African ancestors strolled

From the mother land.

A band

Of men, women and children

Whose looks over time and descendents

Paled to cope with cold.

And as we weathered,

My people became coloured.

We settled many places

And became many shades of white races.

Our character carried this pioneer spirit that didn’t recognise

The rights of others. We named this trait “civilised”.

Our link to nature lost,

We invented religion at the cost

Of forgetting the earth

Is bound in spiritual worth

With She, our ancestral Queen, the Great Mystery.

Instead, we worshipped ourselves and called our faith His-story.

We proclaimed a God in our own image

And invented in Him our desire for rage.

Ignoring His son’s life of Peace. Without shame

We bestowed gifts upon ourselves in His name.

Gifts of green, but not of nature.

Instead the colour of ink on white-like-us-paper.

Our beliefs in God, ourselves and greed

Were able to justify that others should bleed.

Journeys began across land and sea.

Found old places and called it “discovery”.

Indigenous peoples viewed as a different class,

Yet we hadn’t recognised ourselves from our past.

What should have been a family reunion

Instead became butchery after Sunday communion.

Ships that should have united all in ancestry

Stole kin from lands and transported them to slavery.

Spread Christian beliefs across African nations,

A Caucasian Jesus inventing racial discrimination.

Beauty took form in what was white and European.

De-beautified Queens raped among sugar cane in the Caribbean.

Isolated a people that rose and beat us

So that now we even bus

White tourists onto Haitian segregated sands

Denying distant relatives the riches of their lands,

As the wealthy bathe away from poor,

More Africans hit with an apartheid law.

We created empires that butchered a family,

Then called it a Commonwealth in the name of equality,

But to member states I’m humbly suggesting,

It’s like a child staying with the father who molested him.

Wind back our evolution to the start of the tree.

Truth of the matter would f*ck up the BNP.

From Africa our ancestors were born,

And now, as white, we pass scorn

Over brothers and sisters we don’t view as equal.

When we left our Mother, we were infested with evil.

Of the worlds nearly 7 billion population only some 1 billion people are white (Wikianwers). The same article described the majority of the world's population (nearly 6 billlion people) as "people of colour". Now let me revisit this. Let’s take it back.. Humanity began in Africa and spread around the globe. Europeans turned white because they couldn’t absorb sufficient vitamin D from the lack of sun. So this 15% or so of the earths population changed colour…. So do we need to revisit who is termed "people of colour". If something is different to a norm, is that the basis for when we use adjectives?… something is small if its smaller than normal etc., so if we are applying adjectives to complexion, surely those that are different to the norm should get the adjective….europeans are coloured?

Peace and respect

Sloetry