By Brian Ives
Over the past few years, former Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters has been outspoken on his views on the Israeli-Palestenian conflict. And based on a new op-ed he wrote for Salon, his views have not changed.
One new element, however, that Waters brings to the table isn’t his opinion on the current conflict—it’s his penchant for poetry. His Salon piece includes a poem he wrote recently called “Crystal Clear Brooks.”
Waters’ stance is pro-Palestinian and has been viewed by many as being anti-Israel, even being anti-Semitic. Last year, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, he urged artists to boycott Israel, and took credit for Stevie Wonder canceling a performance in that country. Soon after, New York’s 92nd Street YMCA cancelled a scheduled event featuring Waters, after receiving pressure from members of the Jewish community.
In an interview days after the cancellation, Waters said he was “considering” his stance on Israel, saying “I am thinking all of this through extremely carefully and I’m thinking it all through extremely carefully because I care more about the outcome, because I care about the people involved, than I do about the moment. I’m being very, very careful to avoid some kind of dramatic moment that could very easily blow up and mean that I, in the long-term, have less effect on the outcome.”
However, in a December interview, he compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews (a particularly insulting comparison, especially to Jewish people). That led to the Anti-Defamation League to label the songwriter an anti-semite. Undeterred, Waters publicly reached out to both Neil Young and Scarlett Johanson over their failure to boycott the country and even teamed up with his former Pink Floyd bandmate Nick Mason to publicly ask the Rolling Stones to cancel their concert in Israel.
Now, Waters has written an op-ed for Salon, criticizing Congress’ support of Israel, asking, “What, I wonder, would Americans do if it were their neighborhoods being invaded and if they were the ones living under siege? I think it’s safe to say Americans wouldn’t stand for it.”
He then shared a poem that he recently wrote, called “Crystal Clear Brooks.” “Although it expresses my feelings, I cannot but think that the children in Gaza would give anything but their birthright and their pride and their basic human rights for a glass of crystal clear water. And, I think too, of the Bakr children, the sons of fishermen, who were slain while playing on a Gaza beach.”
Crystal clear brooks
When the time comes
And the last day dawns
And the air of the piper warms
The high crags of the old country
When the holy writ blows
Like burned paper away
And wise men concede
That there’s more than one way
More than one path
More than one book
More than one fisherman
More than one hook
When the cats have been skinned
And the fish have been hooked
When the masters of war
Are our masters no more
When old friends take their whiskey
Outside on the porch
We will have done well
If we’re able to say
As the sun settles down
On that final day
That we never gave in
That we did all we could
So the kids could go fishing
In crystal clear brooks.
Read Waters’s entire post here.
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