POETRY

Somewhere in our house – built in the same year that

the British-Indian army retreated

from Kabul, and an Act of Parliament

outlawed women, girls and boys under ten

working underground in collieries –

The Boss aka Bruce Springsteen is singing of

‘The Streets of Minneapolis’, a song in that

unyielding tradition: ‘My Land Is Your Land’,

‘Sometime I Feel Like A Motherless Child’.

 

***

 

In Antiquity and the Dark Ages

hundreds of thousands were bought and sold each year.

The city of Venice became an Empire

because of the riches slavery brought.

In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

ten million were taken from Africa

to the Americas. All were branded.

In Great Britain mill owners and bankers,

monarchs and cotton merchants grew rich.

The word ‘slave’ is from ‘Slav’ – whole communities,

entire peoples enslaved. ‘A’ is for ‘Auschwitz’.

 

***

 

Massacres at Wounded Knee, Amritsar,

and Martyr’s Square, Tehran, for example,

are imperious spasms, the arteries

of kindness hardened by othering;

bridges demolished – in Karaj, Iran,

Mostar, Bosnia, over the Litani

in Lebanon – solely out of spite,

to make burdened lives more burdensome;

the sanatorium assailed in Otwock’s

ghetto, hospitals in Hiroshima

and Dresden, ambulances in Gaza, in Beirut,

to show who matters and who does not.

 

***

 

Patrick Henry, conflicted slave owner,

was one of the two Founding Fathers

who would not ratify the Constitution,

which ‘would give a felon the chance to make

one bold push for the American throne…’

 

And two hundred and fifty years later

a convicted felon squats on that throne

as emperor. However, there might be

some small comfort in the thought that empires,

in due course, as Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘die by

suicide not murder’.