High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

Anna Chen – First published 11 July 2025, Anna May Wong and containing China

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

Anna May Wong Must Die! but the China dynamic lives on

China catches up and America fires off a frenzy of Yellow Peril mania ever since Trump’s first trade war doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Western anxiety about Chinese getting too big for their foot bindings has been with us ever since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The mountain of guilt, fear, loathing and desire that went into defining them as a dehumanised Other is still with us today, turbo-charged by neocon ambitions.

Yep, desire is in there as well: you fear the thing you crave. And, so often, vice versa. Powerful it may be, but the impulse is also paralysing.

One way to escape the pain is to destroy the object of desire. What was Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick about if not the control of the entity that was more powerful than him, making off with his leg in a classic image of castration? Some societies eat their enemy. Some have hot wars. Many seek resolution in territorial pissing turf wars.

Green Hornet Syndrome

In the light of all-pervasive sinophobic insanity, I’m coining the term Green Hornet Syndrome to designate the white saviour cohort which insists on Chinese being underlings, or invisible even –— especially! — when outclassed by them.

Be a sidekick or die.

At the macro level, it means tearing down China for being so damn good.

At the micro level, it means tearing down Chinese for being so damn good.

And that’s across the political spectrum.

It’s not just the usual suspects of the usurped Masters of the Universe who cling on to the delusion of supremacy. Purported progressives who can’t resist the system’s white domination blandishments, even subconsciously, are also doing the work of the state. If there’s no visibility, there’s no empathy. No empathy means less resistance to war on a group you barely recognise as human. Look what happened to Muslims after 9/11.

Colonialism rules

Deletion, cancellation, erasure and invisibility are the boss group’s boys-club stock-in-trade in the New Colonialism. But it’s not a recently-minted strategy — it has a tedious history.

In America’s economic downturn of the 1870s, it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white man. Demagogues like Denis Kearney were able to whip up a diversionary wave of hate among European workers who were losing their livelihoods, culminating in the Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically aimed at the Chinese.

We see the same attitudes today despite the lip-service of enlightenment. Chinese are written off as copyists, incapable of original thought. They lack an inner life. The ruling group must speak for them. Nothing is true until a white person says it is true.

This regression into archaic relations from a bygone era exposes a widespread lowering of consciousness that’s depressingly become the norm in what we vainly think of as our sophisticated age.

The template currently coded into the Matrix seems to be: occupy the space and clear out the inhabitants. Absurdly, in the face of World War III, the urge to be an asshat eclipses urgent communal efforts for the collective good. A colonial mindset prevails when more self-knowledge, generosity and solidarity in the face of disaster might be more helpful than indulging residual Gamergate impulses.

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

It’s an imperialist throwback that needs challenging. In 2005, I wanted to make a programme about Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, for her 1905 birth centenary. I was astonished that so few knew who she was. It was disappointing when the BBC’s commissioning editor turned down our first pitch on the grounds that “No-one’s heard of her”. Fortunately, my brilliant producer persisted and we eventually made A Celestial Star in Piccadilly in 2008, broadcast in 2009.

Anna May Wong’s story beautifully illustrates the dynamic of imperial power relations which remain embedded in the cultural codes. Our perceptions are invisibly shot through with it at every level like a repeating pattern in a Mandelbrot Set and, as it is ubiquitous, the situation is accepted as a given.

China has been suppressed and degraded in the public eye through the press, literature and the screen arts, ever since the Opium Wars carve-up by Britain and the Eight Nation Alliance which put down the Boxer Rebellion. Yellow Peril untermenschen tropes abound in the cultural undergrowth. Wong’s oppressive experience provided a miniature synechdochal example of the whole process.

I wrote a poem (below) about Wong’s unique pioneering position, wanting to satirically distil its essence and flag it up to a wide audience. It’s not something I was aware of doing while writing it. I was simply unloading what I immediately felt about the hypocrisy and oppression to which I could relate. But the subconscious is an amazing thing. Only in reading it back did I realise what was nailed, the heart of the matter coalesced and exploding out of the final two lines.

The West’s Heart of Darkness

Wong was born third-generation Chinese-American in Los Angeles, 1905. Not only did she face race discrimination in her everyday life, her successful film career in early Hollywood turned her into a symbol of it. The same forces present in Anna May Wong’s life-long struggle within and against a hostile system are here today in America’s bid for supremacy over a rising China.

In her movies, whether playing angel or devil, she had to be punished for the white hero’s attraction to her, sex being one of our fundamental drivers. From a 17-year old playing a tragic Madam Butterfly character in Toll of the Sea, to the daughter of Fu Manchu, her character always had to die.

As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate threat to the white man’s world is embodied in a non-white woman of Freudian nightmare: mysterious, untamed and powerful. The horror! A feminised China in Western eyes similarly represents to timid minds the unknowable, unconquerable entity at the centre of their own id: their fears made flesh.

Even though the white hero could flirt with Wong, find her amusing, be besotted with her exoticism, they were never allowed to kiss onscreen. Similarly, the West may play with the exotic East, admire China’s cleverness and buy its cheap goods, but will never recognise it as an equal. As long as the object of desire never excels, reminding them of what it is they lack, it is tolerable.

However, being cleverer, more able when let off the leash, repositories of secret knowledge held in dark corners of the mind alien to the big lugs who seek dominance, is not tolerable.

Never mind that this threat is mostly paranoid projection. How insecure do you have to be to hold Chinese from Anna May Wong to the nation of China responsible for your own neurosis surrounding their outstanding distinction? Never truly welcomed as a strategic partner, China will always be defined as the strategic competitor; forever smacked down for someone else’s inadequacy.

As above, so below.

So here is a poem: my political analysis, cultural response and artistic endeavour in 32 lines.

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

Down in the alleys of old Chinatown,
In the gawdy bawdy backstreets of sinister renown,
Dope pedlars peddle, the dragon gets chased,
It’s the same old story, the same yellowface
The Man with the Fu Manchu opium embrace
Could kill you in an instant and never leave a trace.
He knows all the tricks how to get you high
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Down in the sewers of Chinatown way,
Chinamen get chinkified every single day.
Little yellow people all merging into one,
You eat their rice for punishment, their noodles are no fun.
Robotic ant-like army with phasers set to stun,
Marching cross the countryside, nowhere left to run.
Here’s a tall poppy soaring in the sky
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Silver screen dreams in black and white
But without the black bits, so that’s alright.
Along came a flapper, a cute little score,
The women went ‘Ooh!’ and the boys went, ‘Phwoah!’
Black hair, almond eyes, a figure to adore,
Yellow skin glistening, sticking in their craw,
There’s a comet in the heavens, the end is nigh
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Who’s that upstart flouting all the rules?
Not one thing or the other, fall between two stools.
It’s Anna getting cocky, Anna out of line,
Anna take your punishment, Anna do your time,
Scary Chinee nemesis looking mighty sly
Crush the Dragon lady, the mastermind of crime.
Anna kissed a white boy and made him cry
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

More about Anna May Wong in the BBC profile: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly (2009)

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

New poetry videos and a cultural feast from Anna Chen

Anna Chen's poetry and politics at TikTok

Culture and politics converge in Anna Chen’s video surge

I’m delighted to announce I’m adding more videos to my long form writing as found extensively on this website. I’ll be spreading the love to TikTok and YouTube.

My TikTok page got off to a promising start with POE, my funny poem about Edgar Allan Poe, garnering 218K likes in a week. Oh, now 219.3K. Yup, who knew the dark story-lord had so many fans? I’m going to keep this up. It’s not like I’m short of material, heh! Please bookmark the pages and follow.

Political and cultural commentary feature as it’s my contention that they are not separate but inextricably linked in service to power. It’s just that the West is so much better at it. That’s not a surprise considering that the US poured so much money into its cultural domination wars.

Culture wars always and everywhere

For example, spearheading the international art world with its wave of modern art. Francis Stonor Saunders explains this brilliantly in her book, Who Pays the Piper? I bought this when it was published around 2000, having been told about this corner of the culture war as a yoot by British artist and critic Patrick Heron in my home-from-home in St Ives, Cornwall.

Hollywood is well known as operating as the main arm of the US propaganda machine with many books and articles now available about the role of the CIA and the Office of Strategic Affairs in its movies. Whoah! Did you know that Hollywood suppressed the Weinstein revelations under the influence of Certain Parties?

One reason America is so good at concealing its mass manipulation is that it’s had decades of practise in its advertising industry. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders is the classic text on this subject.

America has an army of psychologists with nothing better to do than researching new and more effective ways to twist your melon completely out of shape. This has added to the the already existing Yellow Peril tropes embedded deeply in Western culture ever since the 19th century Opium Wars and the eight-nation alliance of murderous bandit powers that maimed and pillaged China for a hundred years.

I’ve been investigating this geopolitical friction from Empire for 30 years, ever since I took Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1994 — a first for a Chinese Brit. See my various writings on this such as Yellowface: the erasure of a race, Sinophobia and the political roots of racism, and A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats and many more.

Poetry videos and radio series

In addition to my culture and poetry videos, and having the perfect face for radio, I’m going to be uploading 16 episodes of my pioneering ResonanceFM series from 2013 and 2014, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge. I’m aiming to get these up on YouTube and at this website over the rest of the year. So do have a listen to what someone straddling two major cultures since birth has to say about them.

Boomers poem at TikTok

The Diss Persists poem at TikTok

A poem for the monarchy revisited on the Coronation of King Charles III: Eating Placenta — Lines on the Royal Birth

Anna's new website Poetry page: ANNA CHEN

A poem fit for a king. Eating Placenta — Lines on the Royal Birth

Anna Chen reads Eating Placenta: Lines on the Royal Birth

Call me a coronation chicken but I'm sorely tempted to duck out of the Big Event this Saturday. I'm only one of a vast swathe of increasingly disenfranchised, pauperised Brits who can't bear to see wealth and privilege based on accidents of birth lionised as if we weren't all sliding ever deeper into the abyss.

Great Britain was once the biggest empire the world has ever seen, owning 26 percent of the planet only a century ago. Today, we're down to the AUKUS* countries which happen to have been given a last-gasp unifying project by the former colonies across the Atlantic: Opium Wars II with World War III waiting in the wings.

Like Nero partying while his city burned, the establishment cavorts in the frothing delusion that this is fine, secure in the belief that it's only a matter of military might before the white nations are restored to their rightful place as last men and women standing in the rubble of our beautiful blue planet. Meanwhile, they seriously expect us to pledge allegiance to some fairly inadequate human beings.

Look up, dinosaurs, that's an asteroid headed your way, not a revived empire.

The monarchy should have ended with Liz 2 instead of dragging us forward to mediaeval times. They had a good, long innings but that was it.

I'm not a poet laureate so I don't have to write anything for the occasion but, to mark the Coronation of King Charles III, here's one I made earlier, written in 2013. It's how I imagine the real celebrations going on behind the scenes once the hoi polloi are put to sleep.

* AUKUS: Australia, United Kingdom, US with Canada and New Zealand completing the pentacle states.

Eating Placenta is from Anna Chen's second collection of poetry, Chi Chi's Glorious Swansong, published by Aaaargh! Press.

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

A Brief History of the Chinese Who Came to Britain: Anna Chen's Introduction to Hannah Lowe's new poetry collection, Old Friends

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Hannah Lowe's new collection of poetry, Old Friends
Published by Hercules Editions, May 2022

Introduction written by Anna Chen

A Brief History of the Chinese Who Came to Britain

How many Chinas are there?

In 2022, two Grand Narratives jockey for position as the dominant conventional wisdom which will define China and its global diaspora: the one which demonises its subject, and the other which humanises.

After enduring their “century of humiliation”, China achieves superpower status and finds itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. For the past few years, geopolitical stability has tumbled down a Sliding Doors rabbit-hole, splitting the narrative of the peaceful emergence of a multipolar world. One version portrays an existential threat to a western way of life already rapidly approaching its best-by date. The other, which it aims to topple, depicts the dragon reborn, a technological marvel raising 800 million out of poverty, battling the Covid-19 which has already felled western powers, while building beautiful futuristic cities and a new Silk Road.

Into this great sweep of history, Hannah Lowe’s poetry collection, “Old Friends”, provides a timely close-up of some of the characters from the great Chinese migration who’d left the upheavals of a China fragmented by 19th century wars and colonisation and fetched up in Britain. From her father’s Jamaica and Ilford where she grew up to the seafarers and their descendents who settled around the ports of Britain, the Chinese diaspora, established long before many of the nations in which it currently exists, has had to deal with the shadowy identities projected onto it by the same dominant entities who are at it today.

In the beginning … the Chinese were a complete mystery to Europeans.

Early tales from the 13th century Venetian Silk Road explorer Marco Polo, told of the great Kublai Khan, whose Mongol grandfather Genghis conquered a swathe of the Euro-asian landmass, establishing the Mongols as the biggest empire ever. Kublai himself unified China, founding the Yuan empire in 1271 from his home turf around Inner Mongolia and his legendary “stately pleasure dome” of Xanadu in Shangdu.

The first impression breaking through the void was of a magical otherworldly realm of horse warriors, sightings of comets and the exotic treasures that made up the chinoiserie Europeans found irresistible — porcelain, gunpowder, silks, spices and tea — whose desirability would lead to the devastating Opium Wars centuries later.

The Chinese made first contact with Britain in 1685 when the young Jesuit priest Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-tsung, who was touring Catholic Europe, was warmly welcomed by King James II. Unfamiliar with English, Michael communicated in Latin. Until his arrival, few people even knew which way up to hold a Chinese book so having him catalogue them was a revelation to the gentleman bibliophiles who’d acquired their exotic collections from the Dutch East India Company. King James was so enamoured that he commissioned a portrait which still hangs in the Queen’s gallery today.

However, the first significant number of Chinese to arrive in Britain — seamen brought in by the British East Asia Company during the Napoleonic wars to replace white sailors who were enlisted to fight — enjoyed no such representation in heroic tales, historical works or classical images. These mysterious visitors stayed in the poorest areas around the ports of Cardiff, Liverpool and London’s Limehouse waiting for the next ship to take them home. Not for them the humanising engagement of two worlds who’d just discovered each other. Just a minor role as a reliable source of cheap labour. Gone was the respect shown by James II and, instead, hard commerce and exploitation replaced curiosity and affection.

Even this utilitarian view of the Chinese degenerated further when the British decided they no longer wished to pay the bill in silver bullion for the exotic goods they consumed, (eerily echoed by President Donald Trump’s destructive trade war that’s morphing under Biden into a replay of the Opium Wars carve-up by some of the same imperial powers today.) In 1839, the British army, acting as the military wing of the East Asia Trading Company which had applied Industrial Revolution methods to the mass production of opium in Bengal, forced the drug onto the Chinese at gunpoint, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction and called it “trade”.

It was during the ascendency of the imperial narcocapitalists that stories and images emerged to describe not the celestial subjects of earlier wonderment but a debased Yellow Peril, which found its apogee in Sax Rohmer’s villainous Fu Manchu. Stripped of all humanity, they were reduced to a reflection of the monsters in the British id, subhumans deserving of the misery meted out by Empire. It’s an ugly narrative that never really disappeared but simmered away, turning the Chinese and their descendents into a permanent reservoir of scapegoats.

The advent of Chinese seamen expanded the communities of international sailors — including Lascars, Portuguese, French, Germans, Russians and Americans — that huddled around Cardiff, Liverpool and London’s Limehouse. Fewer than 200 Chinese seamen and their families lived in two streets in Limehouse – Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, thought to include five shops and a couple of restaurants – but those few residents were reimagined by the yellow press as an invading Yellow Peril horde.

Anti-Chinese hysteria driven by inflammatory newspapers such as the Daily Express and Daily Mail led to riots in London and lynchings in Cardiff during the early 20th century. So contemptuous was the post-WWII government’s policy towards Chinese in Britain that the seamen – who had run the wartime merchant navy in appalling conditions for lower wages than their white counterparts and settled in Liverpool – were quietly expelled and sent back to China, even if they’d started families with local white women. Most of the mixed-race children and their mothers were deceived into believing that they had been abandoned by feckless fathers, and thus they remained ignorant, until relatively recently, of the cruelty meted out in secret.

Surviving wars, occupation, prejudice and massacre, it wouldn’t be until the 1950s and 60s that the Chinese diaspora would make its longest-lasting impact on Britain. By doing what it did so well with food, they transformed fading Italian snack bars into the first of the takeaways, putting a Chinese presence on every High Street.

After a brief Golden Age in the 21st century when British-Chinese relations hearkened back to those earliest days when Shen Futsong was embraced by a British monarch, Yellow Peril monstering is making a comeback as China’s economy draws level with the US.

Amidst the tumult of lurid media fantasies, Lowe’s miniatures of the daily life of some of these early immigrants remind us of the common humanity currently obscured by the new wave of state level sinophobia. It opens a door into a world which will be familiar to some and a revelation to others.

Anna Chen

* * * * *

Hannah Lowe on Twitter: @hannahlowepoet
Hercules Editions on Twitter
Anna Chen presented the groundbreaking series, Chinese In Britain, which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007.

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Tinderbox plc: a poem for Grenfell Tower

A poem for Grenfell Tower by Anna Chen marking a month since the disaster

Today marks a whole month since the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, yet the conflagration that killed at least 80 people seems ever present, still fresh in the mind and the heart. This is more than an accident, a natural tragedy — call it gross negligence, call it murder, someone had to make a buck. Only £2 per panel of cladding separated the chances of survival from inevitable death. Then there were the absent sprinklers, the single stairwell, the lack of adequate firefighting equipment, the destruction of regulations designed to keep us safe, and all the other corrupt, mendacious, money-grabbing decisions taken that led us to this point.

While the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea took £55 million a year in rent from the remnants of its social housing, only £38 million made it back to the property that yielded so much loot that the borough was able to amass £274 million to spend on council tax rebates for the better off and flashy opera events in Holland Park. The poorest paid for the amusement of the wealthy. Funny how there's always money for those who need it least.

Artists are engaging with events. Here is my attempt to make sense, reflect and refract. I hope my readers get something out of it.

Tinderbox plc

At the hot point
Of the turning world
A spark lit the flame
That caught the cladding
That burnt the facade
And threw a light
On the burned-out shell
Of the state of the State,
By Lucifer's light,
A glimpse of hell
Roiled and erupted.
Two pounds of flesh
Per shake of dice
No values known,
Just the cheapest price
In modern Britain plc.

A giant with his fiery sword
Sliced and smote from the flash at four,
He slashed the night to twenty-three,
Dividing the world, rich and poor.
He made his mark, he slashed the dark
On the bias to the roof and higher,
Earth to sky, sheer cliff of fire,
Sliced the tower to light and ash
On one side life, the other a fire of flesh,
A cash-fuelled slomo waiting-room of death,
Each poisoned breath counting down
Lives extinguished but not the flames
Blackening air with soot and cinders.
That is my neighbour, this is a mum,
There is the artist, those are children
Unto the last babe in turbulent dreams
Such horror wreaks and wrecks.
This is the state at the top of the heap,
What power sows, the weakest reap.

Another giant slashed and burned for years
And turned a world upon its head,
A bonfire of red tape set in motion
A cascade of events, invisible, minuscule,
Each piling onto each in spidery increments.
Action group Cassandras screamed murders in waiting,
Grievous bodily profit with intent.
Lift a rock and see what crawls,
So many in the frame, your head spins,
The shitlist lengthens with every trawl,
Cash is cruel, cash is king:
National Grid gas pipes, KCTMO, austerity,
Stay Put, politicians, the construction industry ...
Even Maggie Thatcher takes a bow
Her dishes are all cooked by now,
Her high rise cladding on simmer the year the miners struck,
No law now, just luck and the gift that keeps on giving,
She slashed and burned faster than the FR60
One-hour fire-hold rule she flamed,
Halted building, sold off social housing,
Health and safety not gone mad. Just gone.

Aberfan, Hillsborough, Grenfell Tower,
Who had the cash also had the power
To wrap Babel in plastic, for the view palled,
No thought for the living when the opera calls,
A class event, a bagatelle paid for with Grenfell rents,
Rip off the poorest, the system bent.
Gas pipes up the stairwell, smoke in the vents,
Alarms on the fritz, saved a few pence,
Water pressure failing, too little spent,
Retrofit sprinklers too high an expense
And on ignition, stay put was their best advice.
Two pounds of flesh per shake of dice
No values here, just the cheapest price.

The giant scrawled in smoke and flame
Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
But the firefighters came in all the same
Through Bosch's vision, the scorching Hotpoint near,
Over bodies they clambered, up clogging stairs
Barely three feet wide, on a wing and a prayer
And an underfunded gulp of air.
The sullied air chokes but the horror is pure,
Breathe deep and inhale fury and fear,
Cyanide, asbestos and your neighbours.
Which is the most toxic?
Down in your lungs even now
The death clock ticks, reset

Time was the enemy.
Fire was the enemy.
Mammon was the enemy.
Kensington and Chelsea council was the enemy.
Kensington and Chelsea TMO was the enemy.
The industry was the enemy.
The government was the enemy.
They sprung a trap, a trap was sprung.

Yet still we lived. Watching from an outer circle,
We were resourceful in those hours.
In our heads, at least, perhaps a car could provide a landing.
Could a mountain of mattresses soften the fall?
For these were no princesses on the pea
But cheeky, boisterous boys and girls.
We wished a man could fly.
We wished for Superman, iced chunk of Thames in tow.
We wished a child could bounce,
That they weighed a quarter of an ounce.
We wished we could put gravity on hold
Stretch this moment til an escape was found,
Slow down damn time til they reached the ground.
A thousand people prayed a million wishes:
For a Star Trek transporter to beam them away,
A fakir's rope dropping as the gentle rain from heaven,
For wings to sprout, something miraculous to get them out.
A ladder! A tall ladder, a platform with a high pressure hose,
No, too fanciful when the giant slashes and fire stations close.

Did those knotted blankets lead someone to safety
Or a dead end?
"I had my whole life ahead of me," Gloria Trevisan told her mum.
And it was.
Six and a half minutes with Rania Ibrahim
Is to take a trip to a dark side,
Her voice rings out truth everlasting.
Walk with her, it's the least she deserves.
Walk with the Grenfell dead and soar with angels.
A bonfire of people followed the bonfire of regulations
As surely as night followed night followed darkest night of the soul
Cry cruellest murder, the tower can never be put right.

Over the main route into London from Heathrow,
Looms a burnt-out colossus:
A coked-up Tory wideboy in a cheap suit with a pocketful of loot;
We all learnt the meaning of metaphor that night
In Tinderbox plc.

by Anna Chen
12th July 2017

The author was born and raised in Hackney in east London and lived at Hackney Downs and the Gascoyne Estate.

Apologies for not being able to find the photographers who took the photographs on this page. Please let me know if you took the photographs and if I have your permission to use them with a credit (or if you'd like them taken down). By the same token, please feel free to publish my poem with a credit and link to this page. Thank you.

The Tower: Rewriting Grenfell. Measured, factual, humane response from Architects for Social Housing (ASH) to Andrew O’Hagan'S 60,000 word clickbait article in the London Review of Books defending the RBKC council.

EDIT: More poems are turning up. I'll link to some of them here.

Grenfell Tower, June, 2017: a poem by Ben Okri. ‘If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.’ Video here

This video of "No Alarms" by Sana Uqba made me cry with its haunting rhythms and powerful imagery

The Merited Moral Remembrance Of The Wilfully Massacred Residents Of Grenfell Tower - Poem by Stanley Collymore

"Grenfell" by Olga Dermott-Bond

"Nowhere": a response to the housing crisis by poet Tony Walsh – audio

"A Hope for the Future" by Angi Holden

On the Liturgical Poetry website, "Grenfell"

"Grenfell Tower" by Lisa Rey

"Towering Shame" by Sarah McGurk

Video of "Grenfell Fell" by Rakin Cisse Niass

"Grenfell Tower" by Maxine Black

"Kensington and Chelsea" by David R Mellor

Video of "Grenfell Tower Fire" by The Truth Poet

"Family Trees (Grenfell Tower)" by Steve Rowland

"Of Grenfell Tower and other scandals": Why we must Whistleblow a wind of change, by John Pearce.

I think this one is from a firefighter or police at the scene: "The Grenfell Tower" by Thin Blue Line UK

"For Grenfell Tower" by Dave Rendle

Two poems at the Culture Matters page, one by Alan Morrison and one by Paul Dovey

Stunning video, "Ghosts of Grenfell", from Lowkey. Live dates


"14th June 2017", a beautiful poem from someone who was instrumental in filling the void left by local and national government, badly marred by territorial pissing in the final stanza. A conclusion about universal love and empathy rather than a demand for "I am not my brother's keeper" indifference might have been more apt because a denial of others' empathy in a cruel world is surely not the path to follow. We are all pieces of the continent of humankind — Picasso didn't have to be at Guernica in order to paint the horror. Would be vastly improved by losing the last six lines.

Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen poetry review: Ungrateful — A Paper Daughter

Review of Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen's poetry collection: glimpses of perpetual marginalisation

A moving, fairly disturbing, collection of poetry from Hong-Kong-born writer and actor Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen, Ungrateful — A Paper Daughter, takes you deep inside the experience of perpetual marginalisation. All the small everyday unthinking acts of callousness that grind you down are laid bare on paper. It begs the question: why do we do this to each other?

There's lot of pain in each of these short poems powered by a strong voice and a clarity of vision that blasts away extraneous matter to reveal the hard, white glittering diamond at the centre.

Each poem grants a glimpse of what it was like to be a Chinese adoptee in Britain in the 1960s onwards, taken on as a baby by a well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-their-depth white family. How must it have felt never having your inner workings seen or responded to with warmth, and an almost entire absence of the most basic human connection: love. A weaker character might have been driven debilitatingly mad but instead, Lucy uses it to fuel her art, to make us see and experience what this existence is like for the person at the heart of it. Together they roll up into a massive punch.

It's not an unrelenting wave of misery, more a series of vignettes, a shutter opening and closing, giving us snapshots of a unique life. In "China Is Not a Good Place to Be a Bird" she finds herself a murmuration of starlings when she longs to be free, "screeching across the air Like the Feral Cockatoos of Hong Kong".

Even in mid life Lucy is still finding out about tradition and habits that might have been second nature had she not been uprooted at birth. She asks, "Why Do Old Chinese People Hoard So Badly?" and sees fear of poverty or worse in:
" ... a jar of fermented baby mouse wine
Empty jars, a precious commodity
Washed out with care
Ready to receive Chinese herbs
For soup
Deer tails
Dried seahorse broth
Empty chocolate tins
Empty tubs ..."

all waiting to be filled with good things, a bit like the poet herself. Is she perpetually balanced on a fulcrum of unease, of displacement, in the moment before toppling into victory or chaos?

The writing is restrained, allowing us to feel the emotion. You don't need hyperbole when the events speak for themselves, the cumulative effect of a thousand cuts bleeding into a massive whole.

Do Chinese count? Lucy has counted and placed politics to the fore in "Chinese Numbers", a chilling page that takes us through cataclysmic events from the Dover 58, the Chinese migrant workers found dead in a lorry, to the estimated 400,000 Chinese killed by Japanese fascists in wartime experiments.

All those colonialist turn-of-the-20th-century yellow peril slanders are still with us, mutated, morphed into manifestations that are deemed acceptable, often hiding in plain sight. Lucy's poems provoke a deep engagement with the questions with which she's grappling. This marginalising dynamic is real and whipping away like a snake and too much of our energy is wasted trying to work around it. Every once in a while it snaps hold and injects its poison. If the author can wake us up to stare it in the eye and call it what it is, then she has done us all a favour.

Ungrateful — A Paper Daughter by Lucy Chau Lai Tuen is available on Amazon

Heathcote Williams' American Porn poetry collection: balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge — review

Five stars for Heathcote Williams' American Porn poetry collection: balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge

Seems like we are all stuck in a science-fiction writer's coma dream, so deeply weird have been events of the past year. The culmination was the installation by electoral college (as opposed to popular vote) of our Orange Overlord, Toddler Trump. Or is it Eric Cartman and his Asian Cartman counterpart, Kim Wrong-un?

How would Western culture respond?

Fast off the block was Heathcote Williams with his collection of poetry, American Porn. So far, only Williams, South Park's astonishingly good Series 20 with its toxic Memberberries, and gallows-humourist Frankie Boyle have delivered the satirical goods — with the US Saturday Night Live TV series scoring the odd home run with Alec Baldwin's chumping of Trump and Melissa McCarthy's epic savaging of Sean "Squealer" Spicer.

Heathcote is lighter on laughs but more intense on historical background, which anyone familiar with his stunning Royal Babylon will know. There's real substance in his writing, balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge lest he stare into the abyss for too long. Like all great poets, he connects seemingly disparate events, building a fully three-dimensional picture of how we got here. This requires delving deeply into the alt-fact mire and fishing out shape and sense without puking — a heroic endeavour.

In the opening poem, The United States of Porn, Heathcote takes us from Ancient Rome to Amerigo Vespucci, pornographer to the mafia Medicis; from Chatsworth, California, which he nails as the "HQ of America's Pornocracy" industry, to the Nazis and tyrants who have always used sex to cement their power — modern America is little different.
"Goebbels believed pornography worked as an anaesthetic -
His enemies, ironically, could be softened by being stiffened "
Given the choice between food and orgasms, sex-mad lab rats will starve, and humans are diverted from existential threat.

His poem Happy Thanksgiving (as opposed to a Happy Ending) disdains the usual amnesiac festive platitudes for the horror of those first meetings between indigenous Native Americans and European immigrants. If only the natives had had the means to build a wall. "But this nation was created by Zombie cannibals". Williams then gives us gruesome vignettes of barbarism and treachery, not on the part of the natives, but of the pious, bible-bashing interlopers and their God-bovvering hypocrisy. "The Pilgrim Fathers belong not to history, But to a quasi-religious ideal," which is still running things, especially with the ascension of Trump.

In American Porn, Heathcote Williams maps out the background: all the roads leading to this sorry point. Trump is less cause than symptom: a fully-ripe buboe fully charged to explode all over the world.

American Porn by Heathcote Williams is available from Amazon

Copper Comes A Cropper: a poem featuring Cressida Dick

It's hard to believe that Cressida Dick, the woman at the head of the London Metropolitan Police operation that killed Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent electrician, on the London tube in 2005 and terrified a whole lot of bystanders, is now running the police force.

Whatever happened to holding power to account? The shooting of Menezes must rank with Hillsborough as a marker of how low the elite and their servants regard the rest of us. Being thick, bungling and unimaginative can be just as deadly as deliberate malice.

Dick features in this poem which is about the unholy alliance between the police and the tabloid press, some of which was revealed in the Leveson investigation. Who can forget Sir Paul Stephenson's stunningly inept performance? If you have, here's a reminder.

Copper Comes A Cropper

A little bit of sympathy at the back, there,
Puh-leaze. Let's be 'avin’ yew.
At the Leveson inquiry
The cruellest moment is when
Sir Paul Stephenson,
The poor put-upon former chief Bill,
Hobbles in on crutches and drops a pill,
Cutting such a pathetic sight
Under the assembled legal might.
So small for a tall man,
Bespectacled nerd,
Pinched lips, he can barely cope.
Only a thug like a lawyer
Would punch well-honed words
At a man on the ropes.

He says:
I may be public watchdog eyes and ears
but I wasn't there, never heard a thing,
Couldn't see, except for what the reptiles did to Lord Ian Blair,
Stripped bare in the glare of the Sun
And that wasn't going to happen to me.

A loose-lipped minority gossiped
In a distracting dialogue of disharmony,
Dysfunctional, too close for my liking,
But I couldn't do a thing, not a thing.

Ever so humbly, I suggest you are
Crediting me with a level of analysis I don't have,
I didn't give it any particular thought,
No conclusions can be wrought,
It was just something that happened,
Like the Sun coming up in the morning,
Shedding light on the scum we turned over.
I am not fawning but we don't investigate someone
We know socially and with whom we are friends.
Except when we did the police officers.
A big boy done it and ran away
And stopped us realising there was anything wrong
When he told us there was no new hack sore.
We adopted a defensive mindset instead of a challenging stance,
I can see that now.
It was a cursory glance,
Not wide, not deep,
We were asleep.
If only we had the wisdom of hindsight and weren't caught out
It would all be all right.

I'm not throwing my colleague out of the back of the sleigh and
I can't answer for him but
It would have been wiser presentationally
For him to have done it different.
However, he is away in Bahrain and you aren't getting him back in Old Blighty
Until the heat is off,
Until you call off the dogs,
Until the trail has chilled like the champagne we quaffed as we doffed.
Defending and not challenging,
That was the error of our ways.
We are brave and did not back off, guv,
Just because it was News International.

We were logical and needed the polaroids
'Cause the tapes and diaries in Glenn's black bags were not enough.
It was the Bahrain runaway who did not reopen the enquiry.
He failed, it is regrettable. That's tough.
Fear of taking on a powerful enterprise is not the case.
I did not put the frighteners on the Guardian editor,
Or spray him with Mace,
Or rough him up too much.
Politics over substance,
I merely turned up to understand.
But there was no meeting of minds,
My pulse did not race,
You could not get off your face with him
Unlike the real press, proper gents we could have a laugh with
Over drinks and a nice dinner.
Call it folly but Mr Wallis was generous with the Bolly
And Yates of the Yard was fond of his jollies.
I just did not get it and wasn't keeping tally,
The Met caught Chamy Media off Wallis by getting too pally
But we gave him Cressida Dick.

A lack of evidence beyond the lone rogue reporter
Meant rationed resources and an underfunded force
Would not be put on the job as a matter of course.
Please give us more dosh if you wish us to wield the cosh.
I was overworked with anti-terrorism,
The Olympics,
Not my decision,
A junior did it and is sunning himself in sandy climes.
I am an ill man, I need a week in a spa.
Can you recommend one?

And so they adjourn for another time.
But spare a thought for the thin blue line.
Poor Raisa, disappeared, turned to glue,
Currently starring in a pet-food can near you
To stop her singing like a canary,
Squealing like a pig at an inquiry.
Take the porkers she carried;
She knew Cameron's arse inside and out,
Blue heart and stout,
Fullsome about Coulson,
He put it about,
Withdrew when the thin blue sphincter tightened,
Purged the toad and found his load lightened.
Raisa rode bravely into the student throngs they harried,
Righting a wrong for the right,
Got the stomach for a fight when protesters say neigh
And you weigh as much as ten of them
With a bobby on your back.
Truncheoned before luncheon
Unfree by tea,
Scuppered before supper.
A hack for the hacks,
The sack for the lax
When they find out
Her hooves are all over this
and her head is in some mogul's bed.

Anna Chen, Monday 5th March 2012

Note: Raisa was the retired police horse loaned to Rebekah Brooks by the Met.

Copper Comes A Cropper was published in Anna Chen's poetry collection, Reaching For My Gnu, pub Aaaargh! Press.

Poetry on One Day Without Us: I Am Rich and You Are Poor #1DayWithoutUs

I Am Rich and You Are Poor: lines on dead Chinese workers and their rich benefactors by Anna Chen

In support of today's One Day Without Us day of action in the UK, I'm posting my poetry on the subject throughout the day.

I Am Rich and You Are Poor
Lines on dead Chinese workers and their rich benefactors

I am rich and you are poor
I travel, you seek a foreign shore
You have needs but I have more
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

The world’s an oyster, a wondrous thing
Find the pearl, make an angel sing
To swinish herds it’s all just bling
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

I’ve news for you, I’ll beg, implore,
You aren’t walking through that door
You figure what frontiers are for
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

I am rich and you are skint
You slave for pennies, I made a mint
This world loves those who’re carved from flint
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

I weep for you, I sympathise
Look, tears are welling in my eyes
You’re coming here to seek the prize
But tales of gold are pretty lies
You want to be where you’re despised?
You’ll be lucky if you’re serving fries.
Yes, me, well I have cash to buy
Whatever I want, I get to fly

Not hide in a truck, rolling in muck
Relying on luck to make a buck
Stuck in a rut with the doors all shut
Banging on gates and the ladder pulled up.

Sucked down in the sands
You ebb with the tides
White under the moon
You shine in the sea

I am rich and you are poor
Bottom of the barrel while I’m top drawer
I will help you stay where you are
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

I am rich, you’re stony broke
I am special, you’re an anonymous bloke
We’ll only love, respect, honour, support, hold you, care for your loved ones, when you croak
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.

Anna Chen February 2009

READ MORE about the One Day Without Us day of action here

TWITTER: #1DayWithoutUs

Poem for Jeremy Corbyn: Labour Pains by Anna Chen

No slouching towards Westminster by JC.

Here's my poem about the current welcome rush to the heart and head. I guess that makes me a Poet for Jeremy Corbyn too.

LABOUR PAINS

We snapped on a light
and in the glare all was laid bare.
Suddenly Yvette Cooper wasn’t so super,
Kendall won’t mend anything at all
‘cause Liz fights tooth and claw for biz.
As for principles, Andy says burn ‘em.
But the latecomer nails jelly to the wall,
walks tall among the fallen,
cuts a swathe through those in thrall
to the false gods in the shopping maul.
Looking like Santa, cast as Satan,
working like a dynamo, everybody’s smitten.
Bottle what he’s made of, someone nab the patent,
before the bloody Blairites get their twisted knickers straightened.
Groping in the gloom we’d forgotten how to stand,
the air up here so fresh and clean, the view they tried to ban.
Blinking in the sunlight, nerves and sinews flex,
this is how hope feels, it’s betterer than sex.
A pole star restored, a fiery dawn,
this way something bright is born.

Anna Chen
3rd August 2015

Anna Chen's collection of poetry, Reaching for my Gnu, is published by Aaaargh! Press


Margaret Thatcher Died at the Ritz (2013)

Anna on the BBC World Service Weekend programme, 18th October 2014

I was a guest on the BBC World Service Weekend programme on Saturday, talking about the news: the Middle East, The Catholic Synod, Ebola and sheds. This year is the tenth anniversary of the Morecambe Bay Chinese cocklepickers disaster so I read my poem, "I Am Rich and Your Are Poor: lines on dead Chinese workers and their rich benefactors".

Daniel Johnson (son of Paul and editor of Standpoint mag) was the other guest. It was presented by Paul Henley and producer by Michael Innes.

You have seven days to listen … and other Ringu tropes.

Anna Chen's Chinese Diaspora talk and poetry reading at Liverpool's International Festival of Business China Day

A reminder about Liverpool tomorrow. I'm looking forward to giving my China Diaspora in Britain talk plus a poetry reading from Reaching for my Gnu at the Il Forno Restaurant in Duke Street, Liverpool, tomorrow at 4pm. My dad lived in Liverpool from the 1920s before he moved to London.

It's the International Festival of Business China Day. I'm speaking at Il Forno Restaurant and there's also an Opera for Chinatown in Duke Street.

Details here.

Twitter hashtags: #itsliverpool #IFB2014 #onecityonesummer #iliad

Chinese Diaspora talk and poetry in Liverpool 18th June

Anna Chen gives her Chinese Diaspora in Britain talk and reads poetry at the International Festival of Business China Day launching 'Opera for Chinatown' in Liverpool. 

I'm really looking forward to doing this live event in Liverpool.

"Writer, poet and broadcaster Anna Chen is coming to Liverpool on the 18th June to celebrate International Festival of Business IFB China Day and to launch The Sound Agents 'Opera for Chinatown' public art work in Duke Street. The event will take place in Il Forno restaurant in Duke Street at 4 pm. Booking Essential."

Anna Chen's talk on the history of the Chinese Diaspora In Britain includes the fascinating stories of the first Chinese visitors to Britain such as the Jesuit priest Michael Shen Futsong in the 17th century; her father and the politics of the time including the seafarers, Liverpool and his early role in London's Chinatown; the opium wars and the East India Trading Company; how Chinese scientific and cultural innovations affected Europe; the current changing political balance in the UK and representation in the arts; and the Fu Manchu Yellow Peril scare. Plus poetry. Far from being cowed, craven and submissive as depicted in colonialist popular culture, Anna shows that the Chinese in Britain were able to resist exploitation: her own father helped to found the Chinese Seaman's Union and was active in the Save China campaign during the Japanese occupation of China.

I'll be reading poetry from her collection, Reaching for my Gnu (pub: Aaaarh! Press) and some new ones.

More info here

Anna Chen's live dates coming up in London

Political poetry in London — Anna Chen at Campaign Against Climate Change

Looking forward to performing poetry at the Campaign Against Climate Change cabaret 6-11pm, Sat 31 May at the old Amnesty HQ, 25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA. £10 & £7
https://www.facebook.com/campaigncc
https://twitter.com/campaigncc
http://www.campaigncc.org/events/2014/Cabaret

Wednesday 21st May 4pm, another China Diaspora in Britain talk for USC students in Bloomsbury.

My poetry gig at YW8, The Proud Archivist, tomorrow at 8.30pm

Anna Chen performs poetry for the YW8 launch at The Proud Archivist in east London tomorrow.

I'll be doing some of the funnier poetry.

It's a new arts centre on the Regents Canal just off Kingland Road, near where I was born and raised, a po' Chinese Brit gurl in deepest Hackney. Although the gig is billed as Shoreditch.

The Proud Archivist, 2-10 Hertford Rd, N1 5ET

Show starts 8.30pm, Saturday 26 April 2014. In these austere times you'll be delighted to know it's free entry. Woot!

Doors open at 8.30pm with the acts running from 9pm till 10pm. We're excited to have the amazingly talented Anna Chen (otherwise known as Madam Miaow) read some of her poetry to kick off the evening, which will be hosted by the versatile Siu-See Hung of the London Actors' Hub.

Other acts for our launch include: William Seaward, Matthew Lim, Jade Ho and Andrew Arasaratnam.

A free standing open-mic will run after the program ends, so feel free to stay till late and perhaps do a little performance of your own.

So now you know. See you there.

Happy Chinese New Year of the Horse: and a poem about panda sex

Last night I won the annual Farrago Poetry Zoo Award for Best Performance by a London Poet for 2013. Held at the RADA Café in Malet Street, the Farrago poetry events are supportive and inclusive, not to mention exciting, showcases for some very hot new talent. Thank you to everyone who voted for me. What a great way to see in the Chinese New Year of the Horse.

I read my new poem, "Chi Chi's Glorious Swansong" about panda sex (video below), and "Credit Crunch Suicide", a short poem about the bankers, that I'd debuted the night before, at the Oxford and Cambridge Club for Chinese New Year.

Charles Shaar Murray won Best Fiction Reading for his first novel The Hellhound Sample, from which he read an extract at the Farrago Fiction Slam and workshop at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden.

Congratulations to everyone who performed last night — what an awesome bunch of talent. Jason Pilley is an outstandingly original presence who deservedly won Best Overall Performance; Anna Khan has really nailed her performance with the most beautiful jazz voice in service to her poetry; and Sean Wai Keung won Best Debut Performance with his drily witty yet touching personal voice.

Thanks to John Paul O'Neill for putting on a great event that's so inclusive. Over 60 poets were nominated for last night's awards.

My first collection of poetry, Reaching for my Gnu, is still available as an e-book and a paperback.

Here's a poem wot I just wrote:

The Year of the Horse

May you never find pony in your boloney.
May you only find ham in your spam.
We could all afford steak, if only
The government gave half a damn.

Kung hei fat choi!
xxx

Prayer Before Birth by Louis Macneice: a guiding light in a mad world

The world is going insane, the Tory narrative has set like concrete, the far left has lost its marbles along with its principles and judgement.

Never mind the empty left rhetoric, here's my favourite poem that's been a guiding light since my teens.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis Macneice

The Red Dagger by Heathcote Williams: what the power elite do when the poor play up

Part 1 of The Red Dagger, a fascinating history of the poor from Heathcote Williams. When the power elite clamped down on the masses, Wat Tyler led a challenge and was martyred for it. I'm not saying we're heading back to feudal times, but …

Narration and montage by Alan Cox.

Teaching at the Wigan Pier Workshops for the Orwell Prize

Some of the lovely students from the afternoon session of my Poetry Against the Cuts class at the Wigan Pier Workshops, presented by the Orwell Prize.

The workshops are held in the delightful bright and airy Sunshine House Community Centre in Wigan where Barbara and her helpers looked after us, not only laying on a nice lunch, but sending us home afterwards with a box of the most amazing chocolates they make in their chocolatier classes, and a fabulous wood-turned pen!

John Hegley, Will Self, Andrew Norfolk and Femi Martin are among the writers who have given classes for the workshops.

On Wednesday, Stuart Maconie kicked off the day followed by journalist, author and Orwell Prize judge Paul Anderson and myself teaching our classes.

Via a series of games and exercises, I get the students to end up having written a poem they can carry on developing at home or with their teachers.

I gave as examples a couple of my own poems — Credit Crunch Suicide and Margaret Thatcher Died at the Ritz — plus A Case for the Miners written by Siegfried Sassoon in 1921.

Something goes wrong with my synthetic brain
When I defend the Strikers and explain
My reasons for not blackguarding the Miners.
"What do you know?" exclaim my fellow-diners
(Peeling their plovers' eggs or lifting glasses
Of mellowed Chateau Rentier from the table),
"What do you know about the working classes?"

I strive to hold my own; but I'm unable
To state the case succinctly. Indistinctly
I mumble about World-Emancipation,
Standards of Living, Nationalization
Of Industry; until they get me tangled
In superficial details; goad me on
To unconvincing vagueness. When we've wrangled
From soup to savory, my temper's gone.

"Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?"
"Leisure! They'd only spend it in a bar!"
"Standard of life! You'll never teach them Greek!"
"Or make them more contented than they are!"
That's how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike.
And that's the reason why I shout and splutter.
And that's the reason why I'd almost like
To see them hawking matches in the gutter.

That's a poem that ought to be making a comeback as it describes so well the attitudes of plenty of people in power today when it comes to the poorest and weakest in society.

Thanks to Kat for organising the event, the volunteers and teaching assistants, and Claire and Emma for being such enthusiastic and motivated teachers who obviously love their job. The whole day was an inspiring uplifting antidote to the toxic attitudes towards young people and teachers being created by some politicians and media.

Why cats need collars and bells: poem by Barbara Finch

You've had cat gifs galore. Here's a cat poem from my animal-loving friend Barbara Finch — a tale of the bird-murdering Nefertiti.


Nefertiti Puss
Oh God made creatures great and small
And Nefertiti kills them all.
Bad Nefertiti Puss.

That bird you see upon the wing,
It dare not part its beak to sing
For fear that down on it will bring
Fierce Nefertiti Puss.

And when she pounces, claws aglitter,
Upon a lizard or some critter,
It will not even know what bit her
Was Nefertiti Puss.

Her fur and whiskers she does preen
And then she purrs just like the queen
She is, or thinks she should’ve been.
Oh Nefertiti Puss!

And when the cat flap bursts asunder
And in stalks Nef, her face like thunder,
And growls and threatens at your feet,
A bowl of salmon works a treat
On Nefertiti Puss.

When a canine comes to visit,
Nef, on a table so exquisite,
With only slightly ruffled fur
Stares down with ease the quaking cur.
Brave Nefertiti Puss!

When, in the evening, mollified
She deigns to sit down by your side
And, purring as she licks your arm,
You know she really means no harm.
Sweet Nefertiti Puss!

Barbara Finch
September 2013