Compañero

in memory of Eric Levy

by Pete Godfrey, with photo above by Katherine da Silva

Assange is free – and how you worked
for that, fragile as spindrift, drumming
up a storm wrapped in your keffiyeh,
that badge of honour loose around
your neck and freckled black and white,
waylaying drivers with your flimsy
leaves of truth and digging in for justice.

Not the faceless walls of Belmarsh or
scales of the Old Bailey could hold you,
hem you in, as you climbed up the bare
staircase to your council flat – ‘I don’t
believe in property’ – sifting the thought
of Marx and Mao, a sea shanty – the song
of workers deep within your throat.

Nine decades on the picket line with
Robeson and Joe Hill willing an end to
lairds and labourers, the magnate and
his drones, quite clear that flunkeys
went out with the Romanovs – we must look
eye to eye. No ownership of vast estates,
bequests of daddy’s pile, but an arm

around our neighbour to climb higher
and bestow the spoils. We’ll have no truck
with hunger, will lift up the downtrodden –
every person’s sweat a treasure to be mined –
and make a land where each flower may
still bloom. Where friendship bursts forth
like a spring – we’ll call it Palestine.

Jericho

by Pete Godfrey

On a scraggy patch of land we stake our claim -
this country’s ours, not terrain of the owners -
and string up banners, raise placards that name
a wrong so grievous it has shown us

that the courts of justice are courts of disgrace
with judges so corrupt they take their cue
from whispered briefings designed to erase
all sense of fairness - take a bow, yes you,

Emma Arbuthnot, Vanessa Baraitser,
bewigged and wooden, reeling off your lines,
automatons, the bosses’ howitzer
without a flicker of what’s warm or kind

for the man, distressed, who’s in the dock,
ten times superior to you, fighter for peace
who dared reveal just how the trigger’s cocked
to take out inconvenient souls as they may please -

those troops in thrall to Washington’s command
who’ve trashed Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq,
caused conflagrations, massacres - Assange
alone has cast a light on that:

how in the Middle East (and elsewhere) lives
have been deemed worthless, mere impediments
to looting land, oil, treasure, and the cries
of those who wish to blossom meet indifference

which is why we’re here, Julian, outside the walls,
concrete and drab, that hold you in
and try to imprison the ideas that call
out to humanity, look beneath the skin

of warmongers whose murderous strategy
lies grotesque and exposed, arrayed in blood.
The lights turn red - we leaflet, dash to see
if motorists will share in our disgust

at the outrage perpetrated yards from where they pass.
They sound their horns; the criminals’ names we shout -
Blair, Cameron, Patel and Johnson for a start.
And look: the walls are cardboard - push them now!