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’.
By David Selzer