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| Nativity by Sadao Watanabe |
Look, I'm as surprised as you are. But for the past three months I've been involved in street activism in defence of the people my government has chosen to bang up in a condemned hotel for the 'crime' of seeking asylum, and I've been thinking a lot harder about what all my ethics boil down to, and in the end, late one night or maybe early one morning, I found that at the most basic level my answer to that question was a cheesy little hymn they made us sing in primary school, based on Matthew 25: 35-40. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.
I guess you never entirely outrun the ethical instruction you receive during those formative years. And while I ain't running back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church anytime soon, I have found myself struck by the poetry of a child born to parents put on the move by a tyrant who rules under the sign of the eagle, denied reasonable accommodation and forced to settle for the only thing available to them. Have you ever been in a stable? You know how they smell? You know what animals do in them. And you also know what people do when they die. I've always been struck by something Alan Moore has a character remark on in Promethea, that 'crucifixion was something you'd do to a dog', that sites of the eagle-tyrant empire's preferred method of execution also reeked of urine, blood and excrement. That the Most High both began and ended His time in human form down in the goddam dirt. If such an observation seems blasphemous to you then I'm sorry to say you're not paying attention - it's the whole fucking point.
So I was thinking about all this - about the parallels between modern-day migrants and the Holy Family, and those between the empire that nailed a guy they saw as just another Jewish radical to a piece of wood and the one that currently pepper-sprays priests, and the ongoing genocide in the place we sing sentimental songs about at this time of year, and what my government does to people who are protesting that genocide, and indeed what that government is doing to people like me, and, well, this happened. I don't know if it's entirely finished or if I might go back and heavily rewrite it, but it felt important to get this version of it down now even if it does change a great deal. So:
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| The Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans |
A light to change the world shines through a creaking and neglected door,
while bureaucrats whose papers bear the ruler’s eagle sign
turn over in their sleep and dream about tomorrow’s lines,
and hoteliers chide servants to prepare the breakfast rush,
and vagabonds alone look on the miracle and scratch
skin on their wrists where fleas have bitten them, and drawn a little blood,
as, almost unremarked, love is delivered up of love
when, under the eagle’s imprimatur, love incarnate must be killed
with whip, with thorn, with nails, with spear, with gun and bomb and drone,
with lines half-dreaming drawn on maps, with cries of bring them home,
with bodies bulldozed into pits, with pits where poisons burn,
with environments made hostile and legitimate concerns,
with a voice that yells incessantly that freedom isn’t free,
with the criminalisation of the act of empathy…
love will not be turned back by any border we have drawn;
love excavates the bulldozed pits and gives the bones a name,
love sees through all our rhetoric and shifting of the blame,
goes willingly to prison for the sake of those we hate,
as it was twice confined in filth at the insistence of a state:
love came into the world behind a creaking and neglected door
and changed the world by showing us we have to change it more.
