Category: poetryissue14

Our fate sealed with handshakes between

coal soot tycoons and media moguls

and big banks and fear-mongers

and bigots and slippery dealings and

hateful concessions and business as usual.

The echo of humanity no longer

brings comfort or false hope on a sleepless night

where the minority in white towers do not stand alone,

no, they stand in force with

the apathetic, the selfish “not in my backyard”, the grasping at jobs in mines, the “get mine”, the investors and retirees in cladded homes, the weak trembling at the feet of reform

who don’t shake the norm because it builds them houses with pools to retire in behind gates untouched.

The “I worked hard for my money” as they grasp it to their cabana and believe every lie ever told, like the powerful care if there’s not a vote to be stolen, the privatised with dead shining eyes,

the hateful and the lazy and “aspirational” who don’t care to see past their own nose, the easily manipulated

who believe the targeted campaigns and selfish jokers who snigger as the planet burns.

In the tatters, it’s the same people

who quietly and loudly do the work, pay the price, who

have paid each day since colonisers came,

since they fled, who watched on without surprise,

who continue to rise, despite the feet on their backs. The too well known hateful slurs at the curl of an identity, “unknown entity”, the same groups who

organise and retaliate and never rest,

who were born fighting,

never had a “fair go” in this “easy going” home

the same few who care to share some of it with the rest, those

who know it all means nothing

on a dead planet.