‘The Clean-Up Stage’

(a response to some remarks made recently on Facebook)

The 'clean-up stage' was how she described it.
She could not know how my mouth had fallen open.
I saw again the cattle trucks pull in at the station,
anxious fingers groping towards freedom,
heard, renewed and re-doubled, the desperate pleas
of those people left to swelter in the sunshine
or else to hack at icicles for water even as they waited to freeze.
She did not deny that some sick people had suffered
but she knew it would be 'ironed out' in the long run.
She believed, she told me, that the government
wanted to 'make things better for us all';
their policies were not only well-intended
but bound to prove successful in the end.
She went on to say that ‘healthy people’
should be ‘helped’ to ‘get out to work’.
At the risk of being seen to ‘moan’, I said I didn’t agree.
What of those people who have already died,
and those whose lives were blighted by ATOS?
When she turns her gaze on the one percent,
I wonder what kind of social justice she sees, or thinks she sees.
And then again I wonder: what is their true objective?
Should I look forwards, or backwards through history
to pick out the outline of the smoke-stacks of their dreams?
Isn’t what she calls the 'clean-up stage' only
the start of an ongoing process
by which they will lead us by the nose
and then crush by slow degrees?

And am I now an 'agitator’ as some have lately suggested,
part of ‘the scum’, the ‘skivers’ and ‘dregs’,
those who have chosen not to work?
So, must I make my bed among the ‘rioters’ and ‘rabble rousers’.
those who are now deemed ‘disgusting’,
the ‘benefit fraudsters’ whom ‘we’ have been ‘feeding’,
and now, or so I have heard it said, like rats
‘come creeping’ from their ‘holes’?
Though I was not with them, I would have been with them;
my heart went with them most freely;
now, as the dust begins to settle,
just as freely I choose my ground:

I stand up for freedom, right thinking, and right feeling;
for justice duly tempered by compassion;
I side with the poor, who must remember they are many,
against the rich and the greedy, who are few.