THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE

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.

 

 

 

 

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