Norman Bissett

Whitewater Rafting: a poem Whitewater Rafting Bone-domed, wet-suited, that New Zealand day, six of us in a dinghy diced with death. Twenty-five rapids made us hold our breath. The snowmelt river took our breath away. Eleven miles of turbulent, freezing foam, floodwaters from the glacial Southern Alps with granite canyon walls threatening thin scalps — our lives flashed by, and images of home. Paddles in hand, on rubber gunwales perched, we worked and worked, fighting against the tide, bouncing against the outcrops, three per side, avoiding cliffs, rocks, death, until we lurched beyond the final rapids, round a bend, into a quiet lagoon, and journey’s end.

Footsore, like the Assyrians of oldas ravenous as wolves, we left the hillbright-eyed, invigorated by the cold,clean mountain air of which we’d drunk our filland slept on the train home from Ballater.Twenty-eight miles we’d walked to Lochnagarand back, following the burbling watersof the Muick, the summit one grand hurrah.That night we fell like two starving navvieson bowls of Scotch broth, platefuls of roast beef,and Yorkshire pud, spuds, sprouts, carrots, gravy,rhubarb crumble — divine beyond belief.After a day of holy, God-like things,the benediction balm: feasting like kings.

A limp soft-soaper, he wouldn’t say Booto a goose. Cautiously neutral, he triedemollience, thereby creating genocide —the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus. He similarly failed in Bosniawhere Unprofor, the UN mission, vetoedthe use of airstrikes to save Srebrenica.Now twenty thousand slain lie incognito’d. But from these holocausts was nothing learnt?Not in Darfur, whose people in their needwere raped, then disposessed, their hovels burnt —four hundred thousand slaughtered by the Janjaweed. What’s left? A peace prize. Eulogistic mention.Lavish farewells. A very handsome pension.

The stripy blazer doesn’t match the pants belonging to his suit, the Hush Puppies worn for comfort, the rain mac — once his aunt’s — tied by a length of string. Chelsea yuppies mistake him for a shuffling derelict on the Embankment, where he hums and sings Cole Porter and recites some lines he’s picked from ‘Ode to Joy’ and Idylls of the King. He’s not a child-molester nor a wife- abuser but a Nobel Laureate in astrophysics, Chancellor for Life of Oxford and a Patron of the Tate. His mistresses have had six kids in toto. Rush Not to Judgment is his family motto.