Austerity

Get out of the red and into the black.

Black? The dead minds of those who will not listen to the voice of those who have given everything.

Red? The blood of those who gave everything for the dead minds to destroy.

Marie Antoinette

Poor Tom’s A-cold

Where do you sleep at night?I asked him.

He looked so tired. With his

Blond beard, blue eyes (good teeth),

He could have been a young crusader

In his stony niche,

Huddled in a sleeping bag cloak.

His boots were in good shape.

In the Roodee car park mostly, he said

It’s drier under the cars.

What happened to you, Tom?

He talks of a break-up with his girlfriend,

Loss of his job and flat.

I had a car once, he tells me.

Four months sanction means

He will be living rough through the bitter winter months.

“Regrettably there are reduced places for the homeless due to cuts.”

I fetch him a pastry from the Tesco Express.

Come Christmas though, the Hospice will give me a hot meal,

And a shower; I do want my dignity.

I told him, I’ll come back.

But he was gone, moved on

By the police with new instructions:

“No homeless to be seen in the city centre.”

We are proud of our historical city, and

Its many tourist attractions:

Our wonderful heritage.

Lisa Rossetti

May 2015

Click here for more about Lisa Rossetti

'Song of the Food Bank'

Pasta. Always pasta.
Nothing wrong
with it, of course,
especially the brown stuff -
a nice bit of sauce
and it's always tasty.
(Someone else can put in
the mix-in tomato sauce.)
It's good for the gut,
filling for the kids;
and you only need one ring
and a saucepan.
That's what makes it
a good choice, you see -
because, well, you don't know
the exact kind of places
where some of these
people have to live.

But, then, what about
the little luxuries, you might say:
a decent cup of coffee
for those bleak and chilly mornings,
hot chocolate, coco pops,
a nice a bit of
iced chocolate cake?
By and large, you won't see
much of these -
expect perhaps at Easter,
and at Christmas.
The cycles of the year
are marked by our giving
just that eensy weensy
little bit more.

Next time you pass by
a food bank collection point
have a look and see
what we're offering.
What are we saying
about what we think
our neighbours deserve?
I am ashamed now to think
that there are women wearing rags,
as my grandmother did
and her mother.
What kind of kingdom
have we made
where mothers bleed
to feed their children
while the incoming kings
drink champagne?

Abigail Wyatt

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/mobile/news/glasgow-women-having-to-go-without-sanitary-products-foodbank-warns-206201n.125162605

‘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.

'Tides, Facebook, shallows and miseries'

On Facebook the tide of opinion is turning
as the media orchestrates its backlash.
They have given the people their hour of outrage
and the chance to point the finger;
after all, in the end, the stomach lurches;
too much revulsion chills the blood.
Now the story is an old one;
as it overflows the gutter
 its effluent threatens high places;
it comes with a stink of something rank
that promises to shift us from our peace.

So now the big wheel spins again
and the story, this time, is 'injustice':
how lives are 'trashed' and health is 'destroyed'
by the willful, spiteful calumnies
of 'fantasists' who for legal reasons,
cannot be 'named' or 'shamed';
and there are pictures to persuade us
of these men's great pain and remind us
how they suffer in their frailty;
the photographs and the headlines grow
reflecting the 'size' of the name.

On Facebook, meanwhile, the tide has turned
and some of us are sensing a sea-change.
The world has heard enough for now
of the anguish of children long grown;
but some of us know, too, from the inside out
how innocence may shatter in a moment
and how hard it is when there are no photographs
to bring to the world the lifelong cost
of our 'historic' pain.

© Abigail Wyatt

Rolf Harris Trial

Rabbit in 'Long Story Short'

It is now seventeen months since I first made the acquaintance of Rabbit. Early in November, 2012 he appeared in my lane, obviously a domestic rabbit, plump and silver grey and appealing; equally obviously, he was then ill-accustomed to life in the wild. Probably, I concluded, he was an unwanted buck dumped by a local breeder or, perhaps, a more charitable explanation, a determined escapee. He was certainly a very hungry rabbit because it wasn't very long at all before he was eating breakfast cereal from my hand. After a few days, I bought rabbit food and our long association began.
     Rabbit may look like a pet but Rabbit is a free rabbit. At the outset of our relationship with him, David and I considered the notion of 'rescuing' him. We were encouraged in this by the number of people who were quick to inform us that 'the foxes will get him' and 'he won't survive long in the wild'.  On reflection, though, it seemed to us that although Rabbit liked to be stroked and would even come when called, he was enjoying his freedom. We decided that we would do what we could to help him get through the winter.  In a very short time, he was calling on us two or three times a day.
     Anyway, here is link to Long Story Short's poetry page where Rabbit features, alongside his photograph, in my poem 'March into April' - and here is another picture of Rabbit just because he is very handsome.

Rabbit sheltering from a sudden hail storm in March, 2014

Baby, Baby

A young acquaintance of mine,

and she types the words,

but I can well  hear

the outrage in her voice,

says she cannot believe

this kind of thing is allowed.

She is, herself, not much more than a child,

a young life, like this one,

yet she has been sick;

she has battled to live;

she has suffered;

she has survived.

And I, I am glad of it.

I see her photographs

proliferate on Facebook:

young, laughing, lovely;

silly, sometimes wild.

I did not know her then

but, when she was a child,

she must have been

a pixie, a darling –

You must have been a beautiful ba-by

because, ba-by, look at you now.

I think of my own daughter, smart as paint,

at seven or eight years old.

She had pink ribbons in her hair;

her eyes were full of light.

What if this had been her, what would I have done?

I like to think I might have killed him.

But then I think: what next, what next?

How would life limp on?

Beautiful baby, beautiful baby,

you were a beautiful, beautiful baby.

You grew and grew, more beautiful.

You grew into a wonderful child.

Now I think of this child,

who is neither my acquaintance nor my daughter,

who will never grow to womanhood

and the mauling of a mother's great love.

I think of her terror as much as her pain

and the horror of it all defeats me.

You must have been a beautiful ba-by

because, ba-by, look at you now.

Abigail Wyatt

Yemeni girl, aged 8, dies at the hands of her husband, aged 40, on her wedding night