The Best That We Can Do?

The Best We Can Do?

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the children of the needy. -Psalm 72.

A fleet of impossibly large white boats

lies quietly moored 

at an impossibly beautiful 

Mediterranean tax-haven.

I read of the growing gulf 

between rich and poor,

how even in the mighty USA

the wealth of the top one percent

equals that of the bottom ninety percent.

Then into my mind’s eye chugs

a flimsy boat, overcrowded

with men, women and children

fleeing war, poverty or persecution,

all brave, desperate, hopeful, scared,

all enduring terrible privations,

the lack of privacy, hunger, stench, heat, wet, 

desperate scanning for land,

the gathering sea, the looming swell,

the vulnerable diesel motor,

the creaking of the water-filling vessel.

Then float images of the new gulags,

Pacific Island detention centres,

shimmering heat, barbed wire, dormitories,

hopeless, hollow-eyed children,

vulnerable women,

abusive, predatory guards,

the hostility of the locals

in these places of planned, deliberate inhumanity

designed to deter seeking asylum by sea.

And what I want to know is this.

Can we do no better than build walls

or nightmare places of deterrence?

Does not injustice foster hate and resentment,

encourage violence, revenge,

the bloody carnage of the bombed market,

the twisted tangled of the torn apart train?

Does not the past inform 

that the grinding shoal of inequality

eventually leads to dark stains 

from the guillotine flowing 

through blood-filled squares?

First published at Better Than Starbucks.