The Empty Car Seat (a poem for Zethan)

It sits in a cupboard
A capsule that encapsulates the overwhelming joy
The devastating sorrow.
A seat that will never be sat in,
Echoing the loneliness of the arms that remain empty.
A mocking injustice
That a cold box will hold what this plush chair should have cradled.
It did not have the opportunity to act out that which it was made for.
It will not comfort, protect or be that which in essence it is.
Just as parents are parents,
Whether physically or not,
This car seat will always be the seat intended to hold the most precious cargo,
And yet never managed to do so.

To be that which you are,
And yet that which you cannot be,
Is the ultimate betrayal of death to life.
Love, the enormity of which can only be measured
By the immenseness of grief,
Cannot change what it is,
Can only scream wordlessly into the night with moans from the very soul.
Yet, the graciousness of the cross is that, even within death
There is life.
There is hope.
Arms that ache to hold and love,
Will one day embrace and be filled.
A face that was known for only a moment
Will be celebrated for eternity.
Parents who are yet to be parents, will,
Through the miracle of new life,
Find a meeting of hearts, a recognition of love.
A chair sits empty in a cupboard,
"Not yet," it whispers,
"But soon."

Enter Shikari, Exit Hope

Something strange has happened in my life.

I have always loved music, but have tended to favour artists such as Adele, Florence and the Machine, Il Divo, and perhaps a little Creed. 

Since marrying my husband however, this has changed radically. His metal music has influenced my musical tastes and now I say, without a shadow of a doubt, that my favourite album of all time is 'A Flash Flood of Colour' by the band Enter Shikari.

I LOVE THIS ALBUM!

I love the hard hitting lyrics, the breakdowns, the vocals, the musicianship...everything really. Below is a sample of their lyrics. It is from my fav song of theirs, 'Ghandi Mate, Ghandi'. It contains swearwords (WARNING) but speaks so much truth about the evils of society today.

"Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think the primary purpose of your life, of my life and the entirety of the human race's is just to blindingly consume to support a failing economy and a faulty system. Forever and ever until we run out of every resource and have to resort to blowing each other up to ensure our own survival. I don't think we're supposed to sit by either while we continue to use a long outdated system that produces war, poverty, collusion, corruption, ruins our environment and threatens every aspect of our health and does nothing but divide and segregate us. I don't think how much military equipment we are selling to other countries, how many hydrocarbons we're burning, how much money is being printed and exchanged, is a good measure of how healthy our society is but I do think I can speak for everyone when I say, we're sick of this shit."

Time to mobilize
Time to open eyes.
We are not a quiet pocket of resistance
This is real, but we cannot afford to fail
Act with, act with persistence
This is real, but we cannot afford to fail
Army, establish order
Respect me and fear me
Fuck you! We have no respect
And when tomorrow comes
We're gonna step on your head
Woah, woah
Calm down, (calm down mate), calm the fuck down
Gandhi mate, remember Gandhi 
Alright, alright I'm fine

See if we keep them silent then they'll resort to violence
And that's how we criminalize change

Awww, yabba dabba do one, son
We don't want your rules
Who you fooling son, we've got all the tools
We need to build a whole new system
To correct these flaws

(You know what?)
I've already listed them
You're a communist
You're a fucking utopianist
Ah here come, the immersive labels
For their attempt, it fails

Cause man, we're so far out your comfort zone

We stop, think, begin to revive
We stop, think, begin to revive
We stop, we think, we begin to revive
We begin to revive

Put the call out to the frontline
Get the message out to the contact squad
Transmit emergency frequencies
Put the call out to the frontline
Get the message out to the contact squad
Put the call out, put the call out, put-the-call-ohhhhh

Oh and the jigsaw starts to build
Oh and the jigsaw starts to build

Piece by piece

Open their minds
Transmit emergency frequencies
Open their minds

Transmit emergency frequencies
Emergency frequencies
Emergency frequencies
Emergency frequencies
Emergency frequencies

While I love this song, and all their songs, I find that they leave something lacking. They speak of what is wrong, but they never offer any solutions. 

I have written the following as a poetic response to Enter Shikari. Remember, even though I seem to slam them, I really love this band and what they offer. I just think they stop short...

Enter Shikari, Exit Hope

Now I don't know about you,

But it seems the primary purpose of your life,

Is to spout anger and vitriol towards society

Without ever asking

What is the alternative to reality?

Your lyrics offer nothing

Except a prolonged mastication of verbal diarrhoea

That spurts forth with no direction

Covering everything and adding to the problem.

I don't think that we are suppose to sit

And blindly absorb the anger of someone else

Without asking the question that you never verbalise

Of "yeah, but what the hell do we do about it?"

When noise on airwaves

Takes up precious minutes of my day

I don't think we are meant to hear our own voices echoed at us

But rather an alternative solution

Yet what can you offer?

You see the problems and have no answer

Except to rant at the machine 

Created to serve us, which we now serve

Which holds you in servitude too

With no Saviour to help you.

By rejecting everything

You have rejected EVERYTHING

And by doing so ensured your slavery forever

Without any hope for relief.

Anger is your cry

Yet it is hollow and empty without any grounding.

You have sold out by raging against the sell outs

You have become a label that has nothing to sell

Other than pointless words of fury

Against the very people who buy your albums

Putting food on your tables.

So what is your answer?

What do you have to say to that?

Your assessment of society is sound, yet flawed

Due to the fact that you are flawed

And none of you see the truth.

For you missed it while staring at the faces around you

Missed the one who died to save them

Who raged against it all until death

And offered his own life to put it at an end.

You offer no Saviour

You offer nothing but empty sound bites.

He offers eternity, he offers life.

Enter Jesus, humanity learns to cope.

Enter Shikari, exit hope.

The Battle of the Bulge and the Strength of Community.

Ah weight issues, my old nemesis. 

Yet again we meet. 

 I saw you just this morning as I walked passed my mirror and was determined not to acknowledge your presence.

I almost could pretend that you didn't whisper in my ear as I ate a muffin.

I nearly ignored you completely as I tried on a new dress. 

You keep showing your ugly face, your sneer and hateful words are expected and put up with on many days, despite how much I would rather tell you to piss off.

I hate you and you scare me, but for some reason I have put up with you for so many years that I am not sure how I would be without you anymore.

But I am learning.

Last week I stood in front of several groups of people whose eyes told me that they knew you intimately.

In those groups your presence was very much alive and well.

And yet it was in those very places, where I expected you to be strongest, you were at your weakest.

Somehow, as we looked at each other and talked about you, it was there that you failed to have control.

There you were named properly and seen for what you really are; something that can be defeated and controlled.

I saw your influence and at the same time I saw your weakness.

These fighters are not giving up.

I do not fight you alone.'

We shall overcome.

A NEW ZEALAND CREED

We believe in God, creator and sustainer of life,
creator of the black woman and the white woman
of the black man and the white man
of the woman who is not quite black and not quite white
of the man who is not quite white and not quite black.

We believe in God, the Creator
who gave us the Silver Fern and the mighty Kauri tree,
the Kahawai and the Kiwi,
the Southern Cross and the Milky Way.

We believe in God,
who gave us a land to keep, 
to reverence and to cultivate.

We believe in Jesus, born of a woman
who was not quite black and not quite white,
a woman who was not quite sure of who she was or who she was to be, 
a woman who faithfully struggled to believe.

We believe in Jesus - risen,
liberator of all humanity, Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-for-us.
We, women and men of The Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, land of the Holy Spirit,
believe in the power of the Spirit to set us free to regenerate our land, to transform our world, to work for peace,
to listen to the cries of the broken tribes, and the dislocation of the 'foreigners' 

We believe in the power of the Spirit to transform our dealings with our sisters and our brothers of other colours, whakapapa, and diverse iwi and creeds.

My Oxymoronic Life (a freeverse poem)

Great is thy faithfulness echoes in my head as the light around me fades and the silence intensifies. My instinct is to flee into some make believe world of my own or another's making. It seems the hardest thing to be is to just be. And so I find myself in flights of fancy, subconciously trying to avoid a conference with my King. I hide from laying myself bare, knowing that you see beneath this epidermal mask through to the throbbing, beating, bleeding core that yearns to be known yet acts as if the antithesis of that is more desirable. Driven by fear my being shrinks from the touch of love as if it would expose, humiliate and take advantage of the weaknesses, the cracks, in my existence. Love terrifies me.

Though it is a solace that frees me from a captivity of my own making, I seek refuge in the dream that Hollywood abuses me in. The fantasy that prods and pokes at my not so perfect body, laughs at my failures, and covers up my wounds with sickly sweet smiles that cause cavities in my soul. This is what I run to. I hide in the world where everyone loves me as long as I am loveable and I play pretend over tea parties where we soak our minds in a brew of poison that I willingly swallow. It demands my all and I give it until I bleed green bills and gold and cry tears of the blood of young women who never did quite make it. All this to hide from love. An oxymoronic life that seeks the one thing that it refuses to accept.

Until caught in the arms of one who drags me kicking and screaming into the light. Who, despite my best efforts, will not let me go, will not give up. Quietly as a child I lie in those arms and allow myself to be rocked to sleep....that is until I decide to learn to run again.

The Victimless Crime....

If you watch porn

You're an abuser of humans

May as well raise your fist

And make your partner the victim.

We hate rapists

And call porn a 'victimless crime'

No,

You just make it consensual in your mind.

You think those people 

get a choice in what they do?

You think they love

Rather than hate you?

Christ said to think

Is as bad as to do.

What have you done

To those people you view?

Would you be locked away

If you acted it out?

What would your parents say

If they ever found out?

You are a victim

Even as much as she

A victim of greed 

Of an industry

That takes and breaks

And destroy's all that is good

Making you a slave

When you know that you should

Walk away, run away

And never return

Yet instead you watch in secret

And in the darkness you yearn.

If you are ashamed

Then should it be done?

They are children of God,

As are you,

So run Child, RUN!

Where You Go, We Go

I know a young woman who grieves
Who has lost what everyone needs.
She feels like she will never be whole
That there is a part missing from her soul.
Alone a night she cries
And screams at God, wondering why.
Though she laughs and smiles
The pain eats away at her all the while.

Grief isn't only about pain,
It isn't just tears, anger, and shame.
It is the contradictions that mess with your head,
When you want people there, but gone instead.
The feeling that you are all alone
That no one wants to sit at home
With you every night and hear you talk
That in the face of your grief your friends will balk.

We as humans don't know how to grieve
For a long time without wanting to leave.
We are the visitors that drift away
Or the griever who doesn't want to stay
Anywhere that they are reminded
Of the pain that is there even when we don't want it.
It never really leaves, but we don't want it
To become the thing that makes our lives rancid.

So how do we comfort this girl that is searching
What do we bring her for her own nurturing?
How do we help those that have lost
The closest thing to them, at such great a cost?
Perhaps silence is the answer, to just sit with her
Instead of any answers that that attempt to fix her.
Jesus wept, Job's friend's were wrong in talking
My beautiful friend, we are going wherever you're walking.

Not Like You (A Reflection on Racism)

You say they are not like you.

Why is that?

Is it because of skin colour

That they are not black?

Or because they aren't white it must mean they are poor

And you cannot relate to those people which

Struggle to provide everyday

For their families and children

Or those with no pay?

Does it make a difference to you

To know they have struggled?

That they have been brought low,

Financially humbled?

Does it matter if you're Caucasian,

Not Black, brown or Asian?

Can we not be family if we are not the same colouring?

That Indian woman in the diary I see every morning

Se is my sister, struggling

To feed her family though she works seven days

Treated like a machine because of her race.

That mid twenties Polynesian male on the tv

Who stole, fought, or some other stupidity

He is my brother, hurting

For lack of education and parenting

Treated like another statistic of our society.

A young teenage mum on the bus

Who we look down our noses at,

She is my sister, working

At being a child and a mum

Treated like a stupid ignorant bum.

Then there is the Asian couple

That get screamed at in the street

They are my family, lonely

Needing friends for their second daughter, that they refused to abort,

Treated like invaders who should be fought.

They may not be white but they are the same

They cry and they bleed and they carry their shame

Deep inside and act tough on the exterior

While we white folk act all superior

Because we aren't the minority

We 'belong' here

And secretly wish they, and their problems, would disappear.

You say they are not like you,

In some ways that is true

But I hold a truth that I want to share with you.

In Christ there is no black, white, Christian or Jew

There is only salvation and blessing too.

I am like you, I am human

I just look in a different direction.

Turn your eyes with me to behold him

And you will see

We are not that different.