Iona Soper contributes a powerful poem which remembers their time in a Scottish delegation to Rojava.
By Iona Soper
A car backfires, a heart skips a beat
Bones of buildings edge the street
Mornings bring old dreads to greet
Was that the sound of thunder?
A dog lies, fodder for the crows
Fates that every mother knows
Fresh alarms from ancient foes
Tearing life asunder
The peace we learn inside the womb
Is piece by piece replaced with doom
For peaceful peoples upon whom
They unleashed their thunder
A shared struggle for what could be
Meets the worst of humanity
It's a tale as old as history
Of hatred fuelling hunger
Othering others is nothing new
Gone is 'we', it's just 'me' and 'you'
And if I'm honest, I fear too
The threat that comes with thunder
Lost is fairness in this fight
Earthly values dragged from sight
What lawless laws give man the right
To pillage and to plunder?
Where means of cruelty meet their end
A broken truce we cannot mend
The powerless sent to defend
The state's fetish for thunder
The men who rain pain from the sky
(That's terrorists, to you or I)
Until they reach their time to die
Will never see their blunder
War makes martyrs of us all
Our minds can break, our friends can fall
But our hearts hear the comrades call
To answer to their thunder
Yellow and green mark graves of the slain
Blue, the dammed up rivers remain
Red is the blood that leaves the stain
On the hands of the warmonger
Three families share one tent
They broke the bones that never bent
Earth polluted, billions spent
All in support of thunder
On unused grain silos flags hang proud
At Haciz checks no phones allowed
Don't women forge the fiercest crowd?
My weakness builds my wonder
Will we survive to see the dawn?
Will we see our homes forgone?
For daughters of Eve, life goes on
Fuck patriarchal thunder
Gloria rises and Gaia quakes
Nature, nurture, no mistakes
Up she stands, and off she shakes
The occupation she is under
Face of beauty, force of will
Revolution, home to hill
Undeterred, she stands until
We all live free from thunder
I am an anti-state/anti-capitalist campaigner who travelled to the North East of Syria (commonly known as Rojava) on a delegation from Scotland in 2023. This poem is raw and unedited – it was written immediately upon leaving Rojava, during the seven hour car ride from the Syrian border back to Kurdish Iraq, feeling overwhelmed by what I was leaving behind. It didn’t feel right to go back and polish anything. You can read about the delegation here – this article also contains details of how to donate to medical teams on the ground in Rojava. I have a background in anti-nuclear campaigning and these days I work to stimulate ideas and movement around radical democracy in Glasgow and beyond, of course taking inspiration from the systems being developed and defended in North East Syria.
For more information on Rojava, go to the Rojava Information Center.
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