Something New: Roy MacFarlane reads Truth is never too old

Truth is never too old

after Mahmood Hussain Mattan: The epitaph on his gravestone reads “KILLED BY INJUSTICE”.

1922 and the BBC is born. A broadcast of a thousand tongued voices.
A song on film, echoing across air waves into homes
and in a home somewhere in British Somaliland the voice
of Mahmood is heard for the first time and a village sings for joy.
Years later the coronation of King George VI
is captured on a half Greek, half Latin box
of wonder holding a Nipkow disk, making
light of moving images into electronic impulses.

Thirty years old and news of a death of a King and then
of a young princess descending from a tree in Africa
as a Queen of an Empire. You’re the same age as the BBC,
Mahmood, accused of the murder of a shop keeper.
All I got to say. I’m not guilty should be enough to bring
you down from a hangman’s noose around a tree in Cardiff
but justice is a loose thing in Empire and everybody’s buying
a TV for the Queen’s Coronation. It’s the making of the BBC

I’d like to imagine the spirit of you, restless aged forty-one,
when I came into this world on the back of the pips of the BBC,
engaging with Dr Who travelling through time and space
with Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a dream speech
to make justice a reality for all of God’s children; being serenaded
on shipping forecasts, sounding like fairytales and tales of forbode,
warning of gales in Viking, Dogger, Fisher. Would Mahmood
the seaman smile to hear the chants of Humber Thames and Finisterre?

They say we must move with the times, the BBC moves online
at the end of the century and after years of Mahmood’s wife and children
and grandchildren pursuing the truth you’re posthumously acquitted,
your remains removed from prison and you’re buried in a cemetery.
The BBC is a hundred years old, the same as you, Mahmood, and truth
has found its way home, an apology from the police and a podcast for you;
this is not a Jesus Christ story, you won’t rise from the dead
but there’ll be a gospel of innocence and injustice in the year
of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

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