Clipper blades and feather pillows

This poem was written in early 2024, with support from Red Room Poetry as part of their 30in30 Poetry Month project. It's intended as a spoken word piece, so I've published the video on Youtube without accompanying subtitles, however you can read the text further below.

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Clipper blades and feather pillows

Snip

snip-snip

snip, snip, snip

These days, you can hear that subtle clicking almost everywhere

a persistent backing track

news reports, lecture theatres, office meetings, sometimes even festivals and protests

snip-snip

snip-snip

the sound of wings being clipped

removing our pinions one by one, faster than we can regrow them

stuffing our feathers into pillows

soothing us to sleep

“narrow your ambitions for brighter futures”

the wing-clippers whisper to us

“a better world is impossible

we have to bomb the hospitals

we must bulldoze the forest

we’ve got no choice but to melt the polar ice caps”

they tear out the brightest feathers first

systematically assassinating the mothers of revolution

before they can even given birth

some masquerade as rebels

machine cogs disguised under rainbow flags or reggae guitar riffs

claiming they’ve outsmarted the system while polishing their own prison bars

clipping wings at the speed of summer bushfires

but look closely

at the hands that pluck so relentlessly

see

the wing-clippers are not the demonic agents

of suit-wearing puppet-masters sitting round a boardroom table,

carving up maps of stolen wealth like hyenas circling a carcass

No

a more familiar face stares back at you in the clipper blade reflection

mindlessly repeating lullabies like “we have to be pragmatic”

and “the voters would never support that”

and “there’s no point protesting – you can’t stop progress!”

Who did this to us?

which sculptor moulded us into such cowardly subordination?

clipping our own wings

scoffing at mere suggestions of systemic transformation

our imaginations colonized, neutralised

baptised into complicity

the holy water was laced with sedatives

but the revolution will not be euthanised

emancipate your thinking

set fire to your feather pillows

banish the counter-revolutionary wing-clipper within you

organise a strike

occupy a bank

blockade an eviction

blow up a pipeline

sabotage a coal mine

cook a meal for a sick neighbour

you are not powerless

you are thousands of generations of ancestors

who brought you to this world to protect life

snip-snip comrades

time to redirect your blades to those puppet strings

your wings

will grow back

if you stop clipping them

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