Political Amnesia

Those whose collective past is badly scarred

By such brutal confinement and killing,

Might be expected to be unwilling

To allow their hearts to become so hard

As to emulate their persecutors

Through perpetrating a modern Childermass,

When self-defence is not even a crass

Excuse. It’s always the innocent in wars

Whose lives too often end being cheaply spent.

When even the hospitals are burning,

It appears there may be no learning,

No lessens drawn down from any recent

History. All seems power and vanity;

Yet there is choice, to choose humanity.

D. A.

Splitting Differences

Ordnance unleashed. A residential block

Reduced to rubble, families rendered

Into body parts, judgment suspended

By the perpetrators of this attack,

An act of unconscionable aggression

Deviously portrayed as self-defence.

In Ukraine it’s without purpose or sense,

Being due to a despot’s callous decision.

Conversely in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon

It’s justified proportionate action,

Targeting a known terrorist faction

That, despite civilians, had to be done.

Surely culpable as the attackers

Are their erstwhile belligerent backers?

D. A.

Conference Party Season

Government and opposition benches

Deserted: Ministers and their shadows

Have left and the cogs of government slow.

Called up to their political trenches

Delegates – left, right and centre – gather

For their celebrations of platitudes

And misdirection, pompous beatitudes

Of concern and tele-prompted blather.

Jam for tomorrow will be generous,

But jam for today is more thinly spread

Or even denied to those on dry bread,

Who should be thankful and not make a fuss.

Broad discussions and debates are arranged;

Then it’s all over, and nothing has changed.

D. A.

Progress

The entrepreneur and the go-getter

Engineered the world as it is today.

The obsolete banished, progress holds sway

Still, but is frustrated by a fetter

From realising what could be achieved,

If no longer bound by need for profit.

All human needs could readily be met

Once society’s finally relieved

Of the burden of money. People can

Decide en masse how their interests elide,

Once they choose to create a worldwide

Commonwealth. What capitalism began

Will be realised when social schism

Is resolved through progress to socialism.

D. A.

Cultivating the Rose

Standing in the Downing Street Rose Garden

Amongst deadheads, the new prime minister

Is making his withering vision clear,

Peering through rich man’s spectacles. Number ten

Is significant, as it’ll be a decade

At least before social democratic

Austerity eases, having done the trick

Of promising progress will have been made

Towards a fairer, wealthier nation.

Meanwhile, more will have to make do with less,

Even as a privileged few prosper. Guess

Who? Such is the dismal situation.

All those who voted for change can be sure

The Rose Garden scent is bovine ordure.

D. A.

War Gamers

Night by night sitting like obsessed gamers

Fixated on screens. This evening’s download

Could be Gaza, Ukraine, somewhere abroad.

Graphics are so realistic, the framers

Ensure all players are fully in-shot,

Both perpetrators and victims portrayed

In role, with impressive weapons arrayed:

Rack up more points than last night? Perhaps not.

A helpful voiceover or avatar

Pops up whenever there’s something to say,

To grab attention when it’s drifting away,

Or tempted to upload another war.

The spectacular needs to be massive,

For viewers to be retained and passive.

D. A.

Extreme Right or Wrong

They gathered with weighty stones in ham fists,

With petrol bitter all along sour tongues,

With words made incendiary by deep wrongs,

And eyes blindfolded with flags that insist

Upon such myopic obedience

To the visceral, that’s so black and white

Consideration for colour is sleight

At best, when outrage remains too intense.

Meanwhile the vision of those leading the blind

Along their dead-end path is all too clear,

They have power in sight, the power of fear,

Preaching the past as the future’s declined.

First there’s anger, but that moment will pass

Until the next night of breaking glass.

D. A.

Austerity Circles

The last time a party fell from office,

It found itself very quickly being blamed,

As the new government loudly declaimed

Details of the national debt and the price

Of a necessary austerity;

So obvious, everyone must surely see

How the previous crew incompetently

Managed to crash the economy.

Now though, with new hands on the fiscal reins,

The Chancellor sombrely explains

A policy of tightened purse strings, pain

That might look like austerity again.

Only, it’s not, in any shape or sense,

Rather, it is the return of prudence.

D. A.

Political Power Grows…?

Demagogue exposed on the podium,

Madding throng milling…then pop-pop-pops,

Sirens and screams as the demagogue drops.

Some shooter has measured his odium

In bullets, calculating salvation

Is just one shot away; he can decide

The future. Only, the one who has died

Never intended to lead the nation.

Missiles into a children’s cancer ward,

Munitions are indiscriminate tools

When employed to dismantle homes and schools:

And what has offensive violence secured?

The pyric victory of vanity,

Immiseration of humanity.

D. A.  

Abstention

Ballot boxes are emptied, all votes reckoned:

The voters who truly merit mention

Is the largest group, who chose abstention.

They realised more of the same beckoned

No matter which party claimed victory.

The almost landslide was surely absurd,

An overwhelming triumph of a third

Of the vote, which passes for democracy.

Front benches in the Commons rearranged,

While members of losing parties bickered,

Financial markets’ index barely flickered;

All that campaigning, and little has changed,

Apart from the name on the PM’s door.

No wonder so many don’t vote anymore.

D. A.