For John Plummer
‘History is a people’s memory.’ Malcolm X
It is VE Day. Though those who still survive –
the eye witnesses – tell angrily of waste
not sacrifice, what should have been a day
of the dead, and the maimed, and the displaced
worldwide is here one of tea parties, sing-songs –
while the toll mounts as if it were the first day
of the Somme. They lied then. They are lying now –
with entitlement’s clipped inflexions,
with the easy rhetoric of privilege,
the sound of the discrete shibboleths
of power and class, the sound their money makes –
lying about the future and the past,
lying about the sick and the dead.
If you are poor, or old, or brown, or black
you will suffer sooner, and die alone.
Pages:
By David Selzer