News

NEWS

 

 

Do not cry for them. They were only Syrians –

not Americans or French, British or Dutch.

It’s just that 300 of them died trying

to get from Libya to Italy in boats.

 

It was the eighth item on the news,

after a piece on the stock market

and word of league tables in the English schools.

They were only Syrians after all.

 

Interesting that exactly 300 of them drowned –

not two hundred and ninety-eight, or

three hundred and four. Exactly 300.

How very tidy. How tucked in and neat.

 

That’s all we know. Not what they did or where they came from;

not what they had to sell to make the crossing,

or what they left behind in Syria,

and all they carried with them when they drowned.

 

Now they lie on the bed of the Mediterranean

and I see them in my mind’s eye, serene,

their struggle done at last. Lying as if asleep,

the water softening their wrists and faces.

 

Children lying tucked against their mothers;

old men hollowed out, their cheekbones hungry,

and all the little they had left beside them

meaningless now and lost.

 

They will lie here until time has wiped them out,

has softened them and they have gone, these nameless ones.

But do not cry for them; they’re only Syrians –

and there’ll be more, lots more, before the war is over.

 

 

 

This is deliberately posted in the week we decide our future in Europe. It's sadly the case that xenophobic posters and rhetoric have been all too much in evidence from one side, at a time when the need to reach out to the suffering people of Syria could not be greater. Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of membership of the European Union, the crying shame of that suffering must be addressed.

 

 

Stromness

Recently I had the joy of being back in Orkney. The islands that make up the Orkneys are to the north-east of the mainland of Scotland: they are, if you like, in the top right hand corner of the country. Mainland Orkney is made up of long, low hills; a seemingly endless series of bays and inlets, and rich agricultural land teeming with birdlife and song. Dig a hole in Orkney and it would seem all but certain you'd find Viking treasure: nowhere in western Europe is so littered with archaeological treasures. And in the high summer the sun only dips below the western horizon for an hour or so before beginning to climb once more in the start of a new day.

But I went back to Stromness. The main street of mainland Orkney's second biggest town is a higgledy-piggledy winding of grey houses and slabs. There is a whole book waiting to be made out of it: little alleyways that lead down to glimpses of the sea; adverts in windows for old sails and boats; tangerine cats stretched in the sunlight; aged houses filled with stories of shipwrecks and mermaids. It was at the end of this street that the great Orkney writer George Mackay Brown lived. He always said that he never needed to travel: he had everything he needed in Orkney, and it was as though he ploughed the very soil for the poems, stories, novels and plays that poured from his pen.

It's in the middle of this street you'll find Tam's bookshop. It's the smallest bookshop I've ever known; and the most exciting. Here is to be found everything concerned with northern-ness: novels about the Faroe Islands, histories of Greenland, diaries from Iceland, the story of the discovery of Jan Mayen. Tam was married to the late great Gunnie Moberg; a fabulous Swedish photographer who worked with George Mackay Brown, melding her images with his words. Both are worth finding and discovering. And if you happen to land up in Orkney, promise me you'll wander down the main street of Stromness and spend a good hour with the treasure trove of Tam's bookshop.