Christmas Cheer?

Christmas, Yuletide or Saturnalia,

Marking the solstice, the turn of the year

Appears to require wine and good beer

To lubricate momentary failure

Of the social norms of the working week.

It’s the lords of misrule who’re in command

Or so it seems, yet supply and demand

Gift wrapped around the tree quietly speak

Eloquently of Christmas credit cards,

Of budgets stretched and unsettled accounts,

Of this season when profit margins mount,

An imperative no business disregards.

With heads still muzzy and waistbands tighter,

It’ll be back to work, the wallets lighter.

D. A.  

Bloody Bondi

There’s blood in the sand, sharks circle offshore.

An unridden surf is still surging in

Under an ascendant unflinching sun,

Rapacious gulls hover and dive and soar.

Beach bags wouldn’t have been packed with bandages,

Flip flops and sun block, but no tourniquets.

A day for standing down and being at ease

With the world awhile, away from its rages.

Folk gathered comfortably together,

Sharing a common weal for a few hours,

Unaware agents of much darker powers

Were preparing for a change in the weather.

How the day started! How the day finished!

With humanity, once more, diminished.

D. A.

Your Party – Not Mine

Is it time a new party was founded?

Sure, the old one’s comprehensively failed,

The locomotive of Labour derailed.

It seems hope is once again unbounded,

As so often before, another red flag

To be run up the polls and kept flying.

Then come the splits, the schisms, the dying,

Such a weight of expectation to drag

Down the vision that was always myopic.

The old nostrums and canards trotted out,

Members who cannot debate, only shout:

Who is going to vote for the shambolic?

This challenge to capitalism’s resolved,

With, at no point, socialism involved.

D. A.

Treasury Tales

Red box of exchequer delights open

To reveal a tax on the tooth fairy,

With fruit plucked off the magic money tree,

Treasure borrowed from the lair of a dragon

Or the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.

Raise taxes here, then lower others there,

Increase benefits trying to be fair,

Only to leave others trying to defend

The little they have got. The dragon’s loot

Will move off-shore, the tooth fairy replaced

By a drone, the pot of gold can’t be traced,

While the money tree’s torn up by the root.

All fiscal tales told, Labour’s and Tories’,

Turn out to be merely fairy stories.

D. A.

Treasury Tales

Red box of exchequer delights open

To reveal a tax on the tooth fairy,

With fruit plucked off the magic money tree,

Treasure borrowed from the lair of a dragon

Or the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.

Raise taxes here, then lower others there,

Increase benefits trying to be fair,

Only to leave others trying to defend

The little they have got. The dragon’s loot

Will move off-shore, the tooth fairy replaced

By a drone, the pot of gold can’t be traced,

While the money tree’s torn up by the root.

All fiscal tales told, Labour’s and Tories’,

Turn out to be merely fairy stories.

D. A.

COP…out

Assemble fifty thousand delegates,

From around the world. Ask what the price is,

When considering the climate crisis,

Of convening fourteen days of debates.

Then there’s the press corps and TV news,

Social media that requires broad banding,

The wining, the dining, the glad handing:

A towering Babel of discrepant views.

Far, far too many are still enraptured

With fossil fuels and profits they’re making.

For all the hot air there’s no mistaking

That not a gram of carbon is captured

After the fortnight, despite pressing need.

Just lots of motions with nothing agreed.

D. A.

No…

‘No Irish, no Blacks, no Dogs’, set in quotes

From a world and a time long gone, or so

It might be presumed, or should it now go

None of those arriving in rubber boats?

Ballistics do not respect borders,

As poverty pays no heed to flags flown,

Changing climate means sea levels have grown

Dangerously high; by such disorders

People, not migrants, are forced to retreat,

To abandon homes, to cross stormy seas

Hoping for better, but no guarantees,

Somewhere fairness is the common conceit.

Meanwhile, politicians are none too slow

At taking advantage of saying, ‘NO!’

D. A.

No…

‘No Irish, no Blacks, no Dogs’, set in quotes

From a world and a time long gone, or so

It might be presumed, or should it now go

None of those arriving in rubber boats?

Ballistics do not respect borders,

As poverty pays no heed to flags flown,

Changing climate means sea levels have grown

Dangerously high; by such disorders

People, not migrants, are forced to retreat,

To abandon homes, to cross stormy seas

Hoping for better, but no guarantees,

Somewhere fairness is the common conceit.

Meanwhile, politicians are none too slow

At taking advantage of saying, ‘NO!’

D. A.

11.11.11

Cataracts of poppies pour into parks

And public spaces. The not forgetting

Has become a theatrical setting

Where the performance of remembrance lurks.

Pieties are preached, lone bagpipes skirled,

The Last Post bugled, cadets paraded.

All observe silence, even the jaded

Are restrained from pointing out how the world

Hasn’t seen war ended, despite the fallen;

Age didn’t wither them, but machine guns did.

National capitals continue to collide,

Yet, should the ranks of workers think again,

Then they might transcend borders that divide

And spurn futility of national pride.

D. A.

Halloween

Halloween marks the way to the season

Of remembrance: let the dead be recalled

To mark how too frequently peace has stalled,

For which there’s one fundamental reason,

The persistence of capital in its

Voracious pursuit of profit, heedless

Of the inhuman cost, of the needless

Near countless lives lost. The market sits

In impersonal judgement as to where lies,

Not a moral, but the fiscal value,

Wherever barbarism’s breaking through,

No matter which blood drenched flag it flies.

Leaving the haunted, those who always lose,

To appear almost live on rolling news.

D. A.