 |
| Inflatable on Kos Beach 01 |
new
series old episode
what's
novel about reality
is
how its never-ending reruns
get
us hooked on the heebie-jeebies
meek
as lambs braying in abattoirs
mechanised
murder goes round the malls
church
& school halls its ring o'hell's bells
broadcasting
from built-in cameras tells
all
from the bombers' Facebook pratfalls
to
their teenage genocide boudoirs
just
think what flat screens have done for war
what
war has done for car sharing pools
how
few real men are left now their souls
skit
or scat with the heebie-jeebies
for
oh what sitcoms are fan fiction's
take
on fake this broke reality
 | |
|
10,000 years of improvised seafaring
I
the
turning point came late in the 70s
until
then Boat People
were
a neolithic eco-culture
archaeologists
had conjectured
from
log canoes preserved in the silts
of
North European estuaries
museum
pieces that dated them
to
between the 4th & 8th millennia BCE
as
the last great Ice Age receded
the
Boat People were deer hunters
who
adapting to the warmer climate
perfected
the antler adze
constructed
vessels from tree trunks
&
navigated coastal waters as sea-fishers
II
then
came the fall of Saigon
after
which reporters applied
the
term Boat People to refugees
fleeing
in overcrowded craft
across
the South China Sea
a
narrative preserved in press cuttings
on
film & through oral history archives
moreover
actual memories live on
in
flashes of those lost overboard
of
others who failed ashore
&
in longings for ancestral lands
which
nowadays are exploited
by
the succeeding eco-culture
whose
folk tales also recall the departed
III
apparently
escaping religious bigotry
politics
& poverty today's Boat People
are
POCs taking to the waves again
this
time via PVC inflatables
which
in typical cases they paddle
from
Afro-Asian peninsulas to islands
under
Western economic condominium
the
quality of pity & revulsion
attendant
on these intrepid voyagers
has
already entered urban nomenclature
causing
the term Boat Person to be vocalised
both
as insult & compassionate expression
depending
where a speaker's empathies
have
taken root or are nurtured
IV
whether
arising from act of god
or
in human intervention the drive
to
call folks Boat People is commonest
amongst
politicians pundits
coast
guards & reporters
in
whose tracts the term survives
insistent
as waves persistent
as
the surge in ocean levels
we
must wait to see if Boat People
undergoes
further metamorphoses
as
profounder geophysical shifts
&
sharper swings in religious politics occur
or
if the term acquires universal currency
when
the tide of human settlement returns
 | |
|
this
human project
as
someone press-ganged into the movement
&
bound to admit most of its mistakes
were
mine I must be pushing it to write
yet
all along I felt when opening
the
daily gazette Jesus wept who said
nothing
could or should be done about it
folks
are going down & the world is too
unconcerned
about this human project
to
save us as a species like so what
they
come they go dragging others with them
or
not soon it'll be some other lot
 |
| Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 01 |
 |
| Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 02 |
 |
| Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 03 |
 | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Readers' comments are welcome!