‘I want to break the walls of ignorance’,
Raif Badawi posted in his blog –
they threw him in a cell to teach him sense.
How simple Raif’s requests: freedom of speech,
the rights of women and minorities –
what platitudes to have to preach.
Raif’s wretched, filthy, lice-infested jail
with its stinking toilets and obscene graffiti,
has, he discovers on a sticky wall,
words that re-charge his resolution.
He reads with great astonishment
that ‘Secularism is the solution!’ –
exactly what he’d written in his blog –
and Raif Badawi’s fetid Saudi prison
fills for a moment with pure oxygen.
Mark Haworth-Booth
Ah, the IT. So pleased to know it still exists. Good poem, Mark. Harrowing.
Frances
Past, present and future we be….
So glad to see this powerful poem getting greater circulation. We need more like this to keep us all awake, however painful that wakefulness.
Thanks Liz.