Staring at Austerity

I switch on my phone.

Youtube.

'The Black Triangle List',

a film by disabled

artist-campaigner,

Vince Laws,

and film-maker

Andrew Day,

comes up and I select.

On a black screen,

white words

begin to scroll down.

The film is silent.

A memorial,

that, I am warned,

may upset me.

I begin to read.

People who have died

within 6 weeks

of losing benefits:

10,200 . . .

I concentrate in horror.

Black Triangle’s

ongoing list

from media reports:

100 and rising . . .

Then the list.

Details of austerity-

related deaths.

A man, 53.

Blind and agoraphobic.

Atos found him

Fit for Work.

He took his own life.

A woman, 51.

Breast cancer.

Atos found her

Fit for Work.

She died a few weeks later.

The stories mount.

I feel anger rise.

Where the hell

was duty of care?

In my ears, each

life speaks in the deep

silence of the film.

I watch to the end.

The website addresses

for Black Triangle,

(the Disability

Anti-Defamation

Campaign)

and the Samaritans,

are the final frames.

Then a last paragraph,

beginning,

‘It doesn’t have to be like this . . .’

I repeat the words.

The whisper feels

like it’s gone

around the world;

when it comes back,

somebody has

challenged Austerity.

Cath Davies, May, 2015

Cath Davies lives and writes in North Wales. She has worked in social care for many years. Currently, she is currently studying creative writing at degree level at the Open College of the Arts where she has been a student since 2008. 

A Lullaby for Our Troubled Times

(originally written as a response to the riots in Greece, February, 2012)

Hush a bye baby,
in the cradle of democracy:
when the wind blows
the cradle will quake.
Hush a bye, hush a bye;
though Daddy croons a lullaby;
when the bough bends,
it’ll shake us awake.

Hush a bye baby,
we’re living with plutocracy:
capital is cool, and all
the rich are on the make.
Hush a bye, hush a bye:
we close our eyes and let it lie.
When the bough falls,
will we see our mistake?

Abigail Wyatt

Another World Is Possible

Another word is possible. 

This is what my heart insists.

It's possible to learn, to grow, 

to rediscover chances missed;

but it’s not by war or weaponry 

our future will be won:

a loving kindness serves us more

than missiles, armies, bombs and guns.

It’s suspicion undermines us; 

and our folly, and our greed;

our vices feed those fears that grow 

to shroud the light we need

to bud and bloom and show ourselves 

in all our lovely grace

and so live well, in harmony, 

in justice, and in peace.

Now our madness overtakes us;

we are beggars, we are thieves;

and, powerful or powerless, 

we share the same disease:

a corporate greed oppresses us 

and woos us with its honeyed lies.

Another world is possible – 

so wake, and shine – and rise.

Abigail Wyatt

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.