On Balance
Welcome to Golden Threads and thank you to subscribers for your interest - and patience! My good intentions have been thwarted by a big life change – delayed and ever-pending. As my future hangs in the offing, I thought I’d mark the Autumn Equinox with some reflections on balance. I’m curious about how others think about balance in these precarious times, so please do let me know in the comments.
Psychological balance is usually considered a virtue. To be not easily thrown, to remain pacific, even cheerful under pressure, to easily relinquish anger, disappointment, jealousy, be kind and fair to others, even those who have hurt you – are desirable if not always attainable goals. But though I aim to keep calm, and might often seem it, I’ve struggled all my life to maintain my emotional equilibrium. No stranger to meltdown, I’ve learned since my 2020 autism diagnosis that autistic people often find it difficult to name and regulate emotions, and it’s okay – even essential – to withdraw at times to recuperate. I’m more resilient these days, but when I do get upset, I find it’s best just to cry, knowing that the sadness will pass. Psychological balance, for me, is not about mastering an impressive feat, spinning plates while pirouetting a unicycle, but a continuous, sometimes wobbly dance of adjustments, dipping and swaying to my own inner winds, reaching in the worst weather for William Blake’s golden lifelines:
Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Thro' the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine.
With their ballast of beauty and gravity, these verses from Auguries of Innocence are also helping to steady me as I age. To drop some astrology into the mix, with the advent of my second Saturn return this year, I’ve been acutely aware of entering the autumn of my life. (And without much of a financial cushion, but money is a topic earmarked for my next post.) Reflecting this change of season, my new poetry collection, Salt & Snow, mourns the losses of loved ones over recent years. But as I learned during my 2016-17 cancer treatment, the proximity of death can heighten our appetite for life. For me at these perilous times on the planet, feeling alive increasingly means being in community, and I’ve found a renewed zest for collaboration this year: with photographer John Luke Chapman / @darklingeye, who created the photos in the header and on the cover of Salt & Snow; Brighton-based arts organisation Luna Arts and their Arts Council funded project to promote healthy conversations about death and dying; plus filmmakers, musicians, theatre-makers, poets, a Creative Director, cat-lovers and a fabulous web designer. All of these people and projects help keep me buoyant, and deserve posts of their own.
Poems in Salt & Snow also reflect my awareness that, as a middle-class, able-bodied white Westerner, I am far less likely to die of violence or preventable illness than people of the Global Majority, who face structural inequalities here in the UK and, elsewhere, war, starvation and genocide. Yet one of the Palestinian activists I most admire, Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh, constantly urges people to heed the Buddhist advice to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world’. For me, doing this means negotiating a balance between self-care and care for others. Along with marching in protests, writing to my MP, signing petitions, donating to Gaza relief efforts, and organising Palestinian and Ukrainian literary events, I make time for friends, sea swimming, breakfasts at a beach café, train trips to walk along rivers or visit art galleries. Due to the forthcoming Big Change, I didn’t get as much writing time as I’d hoped for this summer, but on balance, I am doing okay.
Balance, though, is not always a laudable goal. In the context of Palestine and Israel, it’s a charged and highly problematic concept. I believe that Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th 2023, and should be held accountable for those atrocities, including hostage-taking. Israel, though, is an occupying force, an apartheid regime and an expansionist genocidal project. Even before its epoch-defining annihilation of Gaza, there was an eye-watering disproportionality between the violence committed by the ‘two sides’ – inversely mirrored in Western media airtime devoted to the respective victims. But while I have long argued that the state of Israel needs to be isolated and sanctioned, since October 7th I have given far more weight in my political thinking to binational activism. These types of campaigns are rejected by many Palestinians as promoting moral equivalence between occupied and occupier. But when Israelis acknowledge and reject Zionist domination, it is possible to conduct such partnerships as co-resistance. Such is the stated nature of the poetic dialogue between poets Basman Aldirawi (Gaza/Cairo) and Michal Rubin (Israel/America), who met online in 2024. As Poetry and Fiction Editor of Critical Muslim, I have published Basman and Michal, and hosted them recently online at the University of Chichester. If you’d like to hear them read, they have an event this Sunday – the link is below.
Between war, genocide, fascism and climate crisis, the fate of the world itself is hanging in the balance these days – so I’ll end on a fulcrum between the past and the future. My poem ‘Convivência’, recently published in 14 Magazine, was written in Silves, historic capital of the Algarve; the title means ‘co-existence’ or ‘familiarity’ in Portuguese. Silves retains Moorish influences from the Iberian 'Golden Age' of Muslim rule (8th-13th CE) – when Christians and Jews paid a special tax, but could openly practice their religion and live in autonomous communities. This historical example has inspired the present-day Convivencia Alliance, a group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian organisations, Palestinians and Israelis, who campaign for One Democratic State between the river and the sea. Visions of peace in the region are blood-dimmed right now, and belated recognition of Palestinian sovereignty by the UK and other nations may only be a smokescreen for complicity in genocide. But as more and more people around the world stand with the Palestinian people in their demands for freedom, dignity and human rights, the scales of justice are shifting.
Convivência
After A Casa dos Poetas 2024
An enchanted Moura in a silver boat
sings for her prince as the river silts.
Washerwomen bathing by the castle walls
defy the shade and his fist of stones.
Storks clatter-dance to the sun’s hot drum.
When the egret hunts, poets forget to write.
Prayers, thought buried with synagogue and mosque,
wreathe the cathedral pillars’ roots.
As the black dog guarding the silent house
barks once in the night,
conquest, siege, starvation, fire
flood my mouth, a returning tide –
Silves, in your warm arms I dream
of eating olives and oranges with the ravenous dead.Header: ‘Southern Magnolia: Family Tree II’ (2025) by John Luke Chapman | @darklingeye
EVENTS
L’shana tova to friends and subscribers who are celebrating the start of Rosh Hashanah today.
Wednesday Sept 24th I’m the featured reader at the South Downs Poetry Festival’s monthly event Open Mic Poetry at New Park Centre in Chichester. 7.30pm | £5 on the door.
Sunday Sept 28th I’m attending BlakeFest in Bognor Regis – various venues, all for a fiver (more if you stay for the band in the evening). I’m not performing but will be enjoying the afternoon events including a sketching session and a celebration of the Romany women’s anthology Kin (Salmon Press), led by poet Raine Geoghegan. The winner of ‘The First Line’ Sketching Contest in memory of Roland Manuel will be announced. Drawing helps me keep balanced, and here is my entry:
Sunday Sept 28th in the evening, I’m attending an online reading by Basman Aldirawi (Gaza/Cairo) and Michal Rubin (Israel/America), ‘Your Stories Look Me in the Eyes: A Dialog in Poetry’. 7pm UK time. Register in advance, pay what you can.
Sunday Oct 12th I’m reading two poems, including ‘Convivência’, at the launch of 14 Magazine at Turner Contemporary in Margate, part of the 2025 Margate Bookie Festival. 10:30-11:30. £8.
Wednesday Oct 29th I’m a featured reader at the Oxford Poetry Circle, alongside Kirsten Norrie, the creative phenomenon also known as MacGillivray. Event details and ticket sales will be posted soon at the link above by organizer Marian Eastwood.
RECENT REVIEWS
On July 21st, ‘Salt, Snow, Earth’ was Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week in the Guardian.
On Sept 19th, Salt & Snow was reviewed by Khadija Rouf in The Friday Poem.
