Rage

1

A poet should know
how to compose world-rage
into a Guernica.

Rage against the money-game
that makes children, long past crying,
live short, sick lives,

rage like the subtle workings
of slow arsenic: put into verse,
it should become fibre.

A poet should feel better.

I once threw a clock that wouldn’t go
against a wall and smashed it. Its giblets
all fell out. Two reasons why:
I couldn’t make it go,
and Tony Blair. It should
be better, though, to write a poem.

The trouble is: the archives of iniquity
are full of heavy-footed prose. And numbers.
Injustice doesn’t go andante.

2

640 million children are without adequate shelter.

That’s eighty-seven Londonsful.
(Fly over London, see how small it is.)

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — are worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

Rob all four-hundred-ninety-seven of them,
leave them enough to pay the rent. Then give.

$4 trillion is currently held in offshore banking centres from the Cayman Islands to Vanuatu.

Take it
Give it

3

cries the soap-box speaker to the empty street.
Whatever, says the silence, Barnard’s Star
is 30 trillion miles away, the Universe goes back
13.75 gigayears. These mega-numbers are all Greek.

Who will take? says the silence. Who will give?
They take from mega-banks and give to banks
that are poor and hungry and sleeping rough.

Poets are heard by people with world-empathy.
They hear the command to care, and they obey,
but cannot obey the order to take and give.

It’s a poor poem this. Still, I won’t smash anything.
But empathy is strong and very feeble,
and love cries out in a starless age.