Category Archives: Crime

Rokeby Venus

18 Thursday Mar 2021

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Rokeby Venus: National Gallery, UK

 

unsuccessful MP   beautiful paradigm   refused breakfast

backward glance

ageing face   gawping men   mirror image

five slashes

almond-eyed Madonna   broad-shouldered detectives   opened newspaper

pretend sketching

broken glass

slippery parquet

thrown Baedeker

crowd’s fury

cooling-off room

six month sentence

force-fed

newspaper image   backward paradigm   ageing men

broad-shouldered Madonna

 

Miscarriage of Justice

09 Tuesday Feb 2021

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In El Salvador there’s an assumption,

in many cases, that a miscarriage

is the consequence of an abortion.

Girls who have been raped can lose their freedom.

A premature, or unviable birth

can result in a forty year sentence.

 

How can a country of that name sentence

women when it reveres The Assumption

of a virgin?  Supernatural birth

protected Mary from a miscarriage

when she experienced threats to her freedom.

State infanticide – worse than abortion?

 

Las 17, accused of abortion,

were subjected to a lengthy sentence

in a land whose motto includes ‘Freedom’.

Children, trafficked, may face an assumption

which can lead to Justice’s miscarriage –

Mata ninos -? Rather, victims from their birth.

 

After civil war there should be re-birth,

with an enlightened view of abortion

and understanding that a miscarriage

is, for women, a kind of life sentence.

Why should any state make an assumption

that stillbirths express a woman’s freedom?

 

Accused of homicide; denied freedom

because of complications with a birth!

To disregard is to make assumption;

logical process suffers abortion.

The powerful deliver the sentence.

 

There’s no calculation in miscarriage.

It’s spontaneous; there is no freedom

expressed.  The women uttered no sentence:

I now intend to sabotage this birth.

Or, Drinking this will promote abortion.

Blanket blame’s an ignorant assumption.

 

Denying freedom and pronouncing sentence

on those who suffer miscarriage, stillbirth

is, in itself, a monstrous abortion

and an assumption of omniscience.

 

 

The Red Chamber

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Crime, News, Poetry, Social Comment, Writing

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Masai village by Day

Giclee Prints available of above image.

Another young girl’s death reported after being banished to a menstruation

hut.  She inhaled toxic fumes from a fire.

This poem is my outraged response to the barbarity of the practice:

 

 

 

My turn in this red chamber, wrapped in jute,

drinking bovine urine, for I’m impure.

I may not touch a plant, food, or a man;

I may not milk a buffalo, or bathe.

I’ve come here from menarche to this goth

and I’ll come here until my menopause.

 

I look at the night sky; try to count the stars;

wonder why Saraswati is angered

if any of us wants to touch a book.

She sits, pen in hand, on a white lotus

and leaves no trace of menstrual fluid,

her clothing as unstained as mountain snow.

The swan at her feet drinks milk at its will.

I’m told she is the best of mothers and

she dwells upon the tongues of poets too.

I pray she will preserve me from lightning;

keep all snakes away and send me to school;

pray that my mother will hand me flatbread

and not fling it at me, as to a dog.

 

Chaupadi.  I study my child’s face

and sip gahut to purify myself

from drunken animals who molest me.

I pray the rats will not come here tonight.

It’s cold – cold enough to kindle a fire,

but I must stay alert, for my sister

was found lifeless, smoke-choked, six months ago.

 

Tomorrow will be Vasant Panchami.

I hope the goddess will help my baby

to learn some alphabet, so she’ll read

how to rebel, without bringing bad luck

from past generations into the next.

Then her destiny will no longer be,

what we’ve all shared: the lowly cattle shed.

 

The Blood Moon has arisen over the peaks.

I pray for synchrony; for company

and hope that, at the chaupadi dhara,

I’ll meet another girl who’s not a ghost.

Oh, that Kalidasa would take a dip

with us one day and share our suffering!

 

Don’t sleep standing up. Just one more day now.

.

 

 

;

The Equivocation of the Fiend

30 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Crime, History, Literature, Psychology, Religion, Writing

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THE EQUIVOCATION OF THE FIEND

Maybe a writ of Habeas Corpus will liberate me from my confinement

and then I can steal away from this loathsome Tower and gain passage

abroad, but there is no Court competent to assist me in this wise and now

I am fast losing strength.  I am supposed to be thankful for the protection

I have, while the country demands that a retrospective Act of Attainder

should result in my condemnation for multitudinous murders.

The wheel has come full circle.  A mob had congregated outside my

house in Duke Street and mocked the bills which announced the sale of

my property.  Women screamed, offering me their garters, so that I should

hang myself thereby and men raged, advising me to cut my own throat.

I glugged another bottle of brandy to shut out their clamour.

However, I seemed to have one remaining friend – someone who knew of

my predilection for Colchester oysters.  A barrel had been left for me at

the Tower and I burst its bands eagerly.  Inside there was naught but

shells and a halter.  I apprehended its hint. The delivery youth jeered:

“Canst tell how an oyster makes its shell?”

He is not so dim as he looks.

Photo of the top of an oyster

Imagine! Chief Justice of the King’s Bench at thirty five and Lord

Chancellor before my fortieth birthday.  I followed orders and to this

attribute my rapid promotion and even more sudden declension.

I had another birthday recently and there was none to exercise common

charity towards me, or to share a celebration. I stand accused of a

lack of the milk of human kindness.

I will never be permitted to forget the trial of Dame Alice Lisle. In

contrast, she was deemed to have shown exemplary, even saintly,

compassion and hospitality towards distressed fugitives, but there was

considerably more to the case than was imputed.

I was compared unfavourably to Nero, Satan, Cain and Judas, but I only

sent Whigs to Heaven. It was common practice to lash rogues with the

tongue and, after all, I had cross-examined some of the deepest-dyed

criminals in the land. Their weeping and cries for mercy only served as

an irritant, much like the grit in an oyster shell, but without any valuable

outcome.

How difficult it was to extract the truth from Presbyterian liars! I grew

adept at sniffing one out at forty miles. (Hence the posy of herbs that I

was wont to hold to my nostrils.)  Severities may be properly used, I

believe, in common with Machiavelli.  Particularly in times of threat t

national security.

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito.jpg

Yes, Dame Alice, I turned a deaf ear to your pleas and you could not hear

the foreman’s delivery of the verdict, by virtue of your three score years

and ten’s consequent infirmity.

A witch, I thought, whose husband had been a regicide and now the old

crone was denying knowledge of the nature of the indictments against

John Hickes and Nelthorpe, initially denying their presence in her house,

Moyles Court. Subsequently she pleaded that she had understood Hickes’

offence to be merely illegal preaching. She stressed that she had no

sympathy with the Monmouth rebellion, but I persuaded the jury to re-

consider their verdict and, on the third occasion, she was pronounced

guilty, and rightly so, for the Law recognises no distinction between

principals and accessories to treason.

“Let the old witch burn,” I ranted, “and let it be this very afternoon.”

The interfering Winchester clergy made an appeal to me on account of

her age and sex and they gained a respite. Our sovereign commuted

the sentence to beheading, out of his merciful bounteousness.

Now the populace desire that I should share her fate. I am eclipsed – ha!-

a play on the title of the marketplace inn where she spent her final night,

before walking out of the first storey window, onto the scaffold. They

said it should be ever after “The Eclipse,” as it drew all attention from its

neighbouring public house : “The Rising Sunne.”

Barter gave us the information. She had entertained, concealed,

comforted and maintained the fugitive rebels. The Devil had inspired her

to quibble, as do all witches. Equivocation is the nature of the Fiend and

all his subjects. I have oftimes heard his voice in the courtrooms and the

serpent-tongued dame tried to move me by a reminder that she had bred a

brat to fight for James, but if she had been my own mother, I should have

found her guilty, notwithstanding her prevarication that she was being charged

with sheltering Hickes before he was convicted of treason. She stated that

subsequent evidence should not be admitted, since it had not been available.

Very clever: but anyone who harbours a traitor is as guilty as any who bears

arms, I believed, and I hold fast to the same conviction to this day.

“Nay, peace thou monster, shame unto thy sex,

Thou fiend in likeness of a human creature

See thyself, devil!

Proper deformity shows not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman.

Shut your mouth, dame,

Or with this paper shall I stople it.”

The reference was lost on most in court.  Fools pity  villains who

are punished.  Know this: that men are as the time is; to be tender-

minded does not become a sword.

WinchesterCastle.jpg

It is more than three years since that fateful day in August in the Great

Hall of Winchester Castle.  Some say that a lady in grey haunts the inn

and that a driverless coach has been seen in the grounds of the Dame’s

Ringwood estate, drawn by headless horses and containing her phantom.

What is that nonsense to me? Her head and body were given up to her

family, for burial at Ellingham, and now the Whigs have all but canonised

her, raving about judicial murder.

Yet, when I attempted to escape from this hell-hole, no one would shelter

me in a cupboard, nor a malthouse, and I was discovered at Wapping and

my disguise removed. No port is free to me; no place that unusual

vigilance will not not attend my taking. So, here I lie, and suffer the

agony of passing these stones: a pain as sharp as the gravel of her drive,

or an oyster’s grit.

Yet I still resort to my brandy. I am bound upon my own wheel of fire.

My reins are rubbed with sulphurous flames. The gods are just and of

our pleasant vices… I waken to hear myself cry in the night and then a

distant rumble of carriage wheels approaches, or is it a more horrific

apocalyptic explosion? Who is it that dare tell me who I am?

“What is that wailing?” I shout to the guard.

“It is the cry of women, my good lord,” he replies through the grille, most

caustically. “Come here, most learned justicer.” And then he laughs,

showing black tombstones in place of teeth.

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears. I have supp’d full of horrors,” I

remark, before I remember the context. How malicious is my fortune that

I must repent to be just.

Equivocation – the only means of survival. She was more skilled in its

employ than I.

 

(The grave of Judge Jeffreys was bombed by German aircraft during the War and his remains scattered.  The grave of Alice Lisle can still be visited in Ellingham churchyard.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mansplaining Quennet

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Crime, Language, Poetry, Psychology, Social Comment, Writing

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Females also guilty – should be ‘Mankindsplaining!’ (New generic?)

 

Hot air   forked tongues   terminal inexactitudes

filthy whitewash

tranparent smokescreens   inexcusable excuses   unmitigated untruths

hollow rants

iniquitous insinuations  criminal understatements  overblown rhetoric

smooth sham

Father of Lies

sweeping evasions

Master of Deceit

euphemistic gloss

hyperbolic tirades

Hath God said?

rash incitements

hollow rhetoric   smooth tongues  transparent excuses

iniquitous inexactitudes