How to do commentary as poetry: Brexit - A Cry From The Border, with Stephen Rea and Clare Dwyer Hogg
We’re always seeking ways that arts and culture can blast hope spaces of new thinking about power and politics. Invitations into new metaphors, richer and subtler versions of being human - that then reveal what needs to be done, and built.
The above (embedded) is a brilliant example of this - a poem-film (well, that’s what it is) commissioned by the Financial Times, written by the playwright and journalist Clare Dywer-Hogg, and spoken by the great Northern Irish actor Stephen Rea.
If it is indeed a “cry from the Irish border” about Brexit, it is a soft but compelling one - militantly arguing for complexity and subtlety, amidst the crudities of Brexit politicians about the nature of the Irish border, post the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. The final lines are, to the A/UK office, tear-jerking:
We live here
And we're holding our breath
Again
Because we know chance and hope
Come in forms like steam
And smoke