Watching them fly in

Watching them fly in

 

I never agreed with it

Lack of emotion

I wrote something

After 9/11

Watching them fly in

Arriving in distress

Not knowing

What they’d been leaving

She had a brother

Working in the tower

A place that I’d known

A place that I’d been

She didn’t know

If he was living

The phone call

Came and she smiled

He was alive.

Long ago

I walked home

And heard

Felt

The explosion

My classmates

Fathers, brothers

Uncles, men

Had been lost

We use that word

Lost too loosely.

Killed.

Too emotional.

What have we become?

Stone pillars

Wooden Indians

Vacant

People who live

Vicariously

Just by television

I’ve lived in a time

That isn’t literally

Real or unreal.

I write

About emotions

The connections

People things times and places

Real.

Intolerance

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Intolerance

 

I am completely intolerant

Of racism

I can’t remember a time

When I wasn’t

So now I’m listening

To those

Tired sad old lines

That begin

I’m not a racist but…

Time after time

Don’t they realise

That we

Fully understand

The subtext

what’s not being said

But is said

Opposition to immigration

is racism

And its fascism on the rise

Lets go back to the past

They incite

Empire

The commonwealth

And all that razzmatazz!

Go back to what?

Do pray tell

Workers under the heel

Racism in every way

we deal

with the outside world

women chained

to the kitchen sink

or thinking

forever of England

just breeding machines.

Go back to what?

No education?

No medicine?

No right to vote?

Silence!

 

RAC

Blood

Denver’s blood.

 

One night making the long drive home

after working with another damaged child.

My mobile rang. Denver’s voice:

“Hi can I ask you a question?”

“OK Denver you know you can.

What do you want to ask me?”

“Can I have a blood transfusion?

I don’t want my blood anymore”.

I asked why not. Denver replied

“She told me my dad isn’t my dad

 and when the Court test my blood

 it’ll prove my dad isn’t my dad.

So if I get my blood taken out

and put my dad’s blood in me

they won’t take me away from him”.

Denver was 9 years old

living with her sister and father.

They were asleep when her mother

broke into the house during

one wild drunken rampage

and killed all the children’s pets.

“My dad’s not my real dad

but he is my dad

he’s been there always.

He’s the only one I’ve known

If I have his blood

They won’t take me away.”

 

She sighed when I told her

I won’t let them take you away.

 

There is a poverty of the heart.