Waterland World; or I'm Alive

a poem from a collection entitled "Spit Mancunia" by Gary Knapton

Battle-scar fresh from war-time belligerence

Clinking the colonial toast

Faith moves mountains

They're moving Manchester!*

Carrying her over to the coast

The crazy gang populace

Here in Cottonopolis

Never trod softly on dreams

Brash-brawn autonomous

Re; the eponymous

Ripping up the land to smithereens

A back-break strive

To be lucky being alive

Liverpool took a goodbye bow

Everything just beckoned

They were here this second

They were living all of their dreams now

Many men smiled at the long-sewn promise

That their shovels, picks and barrows unfurled

In a time gone by

On a canvas of dry

They were digging out a waterland world

Having wasted many years

Paying Merseyside dockers

Dancing gaily to a prisoner’s song

Free at a canter

Hear the Ship Canal mantra

If you know the words, sing along…..

“There’s nothing I want

There’s no piece missing

There’s no race I never could run

I’ve Mancunian cotton

I’m alive

I’ve gone and gotten all of my dreams in one”

Years later I stand

On the verge of water

That genuflects out of my sight

And the seagulls twist

Over rain-cloud mist

On melodious blue canal light

Know freedom’s never treason

And it’s never out of season

Did the corners of your dreams get curled ?

Big shout going out

To the land-locked city

That dug itself a waterland world

There's nothing I want

There's no piece missing

There's no race I never could run


I'm spoilt dead rotten


I'm alive


I've gone and gotten all of my dreams in one



*to let the sea flow in, twenty thousand Irishmen moved fifty two million tonnes of land

The Khaldan Legacies

from a collection by me entitled "Erudite Lessons in Rhyme"

 Al Zawahiri and bin Laden

Smiles adorn their dust blown faces

Exiled from the House of Saud and driven from Khartoum at paces

Come to rest where they know best and where their doctrines cannot falter

Cleansing tainted love 

Authentic as the High Priest at the altar

Muslim genocide unravelled from the Balkans to Algiers

Christian Serbs, the French, the British, stooge incumbents shed no tears 

Egypt kowtows at Camp David, Kashmir is a UK illness

Israel is theft in progress 

Jihad breaks the desert stillness

  

Persian oil wealth amplifies how Pakistan just isn’t working

Post-colonial secular Islam stinks of governmental shirking

Lashkar--e-Toebi have an answer for the wayward masses 

Other stories are unfolding west through Khyber’s mountain passes

  

Communists, who rule by proxy, suffocate Kabul for years

Likewise in Uzbekistan where Karimov mows down his peers 

Kurds rebel for sovereign status. Turkic and Tajik’s alike

Further east, in Singapore, Khalim bin Jaffar takes the mic'

Yemen unifies but later civil war becomes the present

Ahmadinejad excites at building up a Shia crescent 

Hamas stands in Palestine while Hezbollah joins in and fights 

Damascus doesn’t bat an eyelid. It wants back the Golan heights

Indonesians flock to Peshawar eager to become “the martyr” 

Motivated by the democratic outbreak in Jakarta 

Emiratis and Cairoans curse the high-rise urban spaces

Concepts dear to muslims beget puzzlement on western faces

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood looks quite naïve in ‘56

It’s modern day successor ditches name calling for stones and sticks 

The MAK, the IMU, GSPC. So many causes 

All across Arabia are fighters bound by local clauses

  

Yemen, Jordan, Syria  Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran,

The fallen Balkan states of Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan,

The Chechyan rebels, Georgia, all the coast states of the Caspian Sea 

The 9/11 pilot-breeding eastern isles of UAE

The Red Sea west coast

Not just Egypt and Sudan but Eritrea

Mogadishu’s Council Of Islamic Courts exacting fear 

Ethiopia fights Somalia. Further north the British bases 

Infect and contaminate The Land Of The Two Holy Places

Many thousands pass through Khaldan, preaching the Qur’an’s Sword Verses

Jihadi’s who hatch a plan sit frowning at their empty purses

Way behind the frontlines lurk the men with training and finances

Venomous evokers of dark impulses and many chances

Western states respond in kind 

The Afghan skyline’s sapphire blues

Are darkened with a droning mass of Chinooks and B-52’s 

And Khaldan camp and Al Farooq are blown back into desert sand

Thus burnishing eternally a pan-global Al Qaeda brand

  

The legacy of Khaldan is a shadow that is falling long

We thought bin Laden ran an orchestrated set

But we were wrong

Al Qaeda is a currency

Al Qaeda is a sense of worth

To energize fragmented hoards of angry men all over earth

It’s not a group

It’s not a man

It isn't based on want or hate 

It's not about revenge

It is a higher pure exalted state 

The Arab-Afghan bases are now yesterday

What comes is stronger

All the tunnels that we thought we faced are twisted, darker, longer

Al Zawahiri and bin Laden 

Smiles adorn their dust blown faces 

Allahu Akbar

God is great

The Hijra is reversed at paces

Common enemies are found

Revive the Umma

It’s your duty 

How God's love is sweeter than the spice islands of eastern beauty!