Bring on the fighting kids

Nicola Adams

By Sheilagh Dyson

Desperately casting round for something to write in this week’s post, I gratefully received this gift from Carol Ann Duffy via Saturday’s Guardian. I was at the time feeling exhausted, elated, proud, angry, heartened, depressed, exhilarated, overjoyed, resentful, comforted from three magical days remorselessly tramping round London and the Olympic stadium and park. I had seen the mighty Mo run in the 5000 metre heats. I had heard the stadium crowd cheer to the rafters every British competitor – and reserve the warmest applause of all for Sarah Attar and Waroud Sawalha, Muslim women running for Saudi Arabia and Palestine respectively, both finishing last in their 800 metre heats – but both there, competing, representing their countries with pride. I had enjoyed the thoughtful, exuberant planting of wild flowers all around the Olympic Park and the serene canalside walk in the shadow of the Stadium. I had revelled in the comradeship of a shared experience, the smiles, the tumult of humankind, united in a maelstrom of celebration.

I needed someone to sum it all up for me – the joy of the sporting competition; the anger at the fur coat no knickers juxtaposition of the money lavished on the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ with the shrinking number of playing fields and sporting facilities for ordinary kids in our country; the euphoria at another medal hard-won with years of sheer grind and dedication; the contemptible ease with which the money men have made ordinary people pay the full price, take all the blame for the spivs and crooks who litter the financial markets and play roulette with our lives; the renewed pride in being a member of one race, the human race; the unexpected feeling of being proud to be British (but not xenophobic), able to wave a Union Flag without feeling queasy about its hijacked connotations.

Lacking the energy and wit myself and with all these contradictions churning around in my punch drunk brain, I was relieved to find, of course, a poet to put it all into good humoured, rational perspective, to make some sense of the wonder and frustration of the last two glorious weeks. (This is why Carol Ann Duffy is the Poet Laureate and I am a student on the first rung of the ladder!)

I think her poem admirably captures a moment, a mood, a spirit, a defiance and I love it. It also exhorts us to reject the craven, weasel words of the government and to take back the power from those who have ruthlessly grabbed it from us to shore up their own undiminished wealth and privilege. The fighting kids will show us the way – hooray.

Translating the British, 2012, by Carol Ann Duffy



A summer of rain, then a gap in the clouds

and The Queen jumped from the sky

to the cheering crowds.

We speak Shakespeare here,

a hundred tongues, one-voiced; the moon bronze or silver,

sun gold, from Cardiff to Edinburgh

by way of London Town,

on the Giant's Causeway;

we say we want to be who we truly are,

now, we roar it. Welcome to us.

We've had our pockets picked,

the soft, white hands of bankers,

bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;

we want it back.

We are Mo Farah lifting the 10,000 metres gold.

We want new running-tracks in his name.

For Jessica Ennis, the same; for the Brownlee brothers,

Rutherford, Ohuruogu, Whitlock, Tweddle,

for every medal earned,

we want school playing fields returned.

Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,

austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;

we got on our real bikes,

for we are Bradley Wiggins,

side-burned, Mod, god;

we are Sir Chris Hoy,

Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,

Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,

Olympian names.

We want more cycle lanes.

Or we saddled our steed,

or we paddled our own canoe,

or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;

our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;

Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,

Valegro (Dujardin's horse).

We saw what we did. We are Nicola Adams and Jade Jones,

bring on the fighting kids.

We sense new weather.

We are on our marks. We are all in this together.

           

So, is that an example of free verse? Blank verse? Who cares - I’m on my hols from college and not in the business of stylistic analysis just at the minute! The poetic form doesn’t really matter, if I enjoy the language and emotion of a poem. Increasingly, poets tend to agree. Ezra Pound, writing in 1916, said ‘To create a new rhythm – as the expression of new moods – and not to copy the old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty.  We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional form. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.’  In other words, it is down to the poet how they wish to express what they want to say, in the form they want to say it. And that is the strength and beauty of poetry precisely.



Woroud Sawalha