Advice Concerning Politicians – séamas carraher

 

 

Advice Concerning Politicians

 

Police your politicians

police them

with the eyes of a hawk, (no less)

with your heart on fire and mind

enraged.

 

Police their lies and their promises

(those broken and soon to be broken),

observe their expense accounts and their pensions

their privileges, pettiness

and loud rhetoric.

 

Keep vigil

with an unarmed militia

from the world of truth

(a world no one dares believe in)

this world not-yet-born,

…always struggling to be born,

to be, to breathe…

 

Guard them with angels

with their righteous and furious wings,

police them with books and old bibles and poems

and the loving words of dead comrades.

 

Watch carefully,

these shameless salesmen of sleaze

and pornography,

watch them

– before it is too late.

 

Police your politicians.

Listen deeply to our sinking world

dying in their two-faced words,

their business-as-usual, cut-price, deals,

their forked-tongues twisted

always smiling like celebrities

their mild and melodious deceit.

 

Shelter us, from their delusions,

these gravediggers of the dark!

 

Listen to them howl

in the emptiest part of the universe,

listen to them cry

like wild cats in the dead of night,

listen to their shrill voices

like words strangled on a gallows,

these preachers of lies and Armageddon

these psychiatrists of so-called sanity,

both friend and foe in their crafted facelessness,

paid prophets of power and

death.

 

Watch now

in this graveyard of language,

in this toilet of money and politics,

watch now a world

where words drown daily

like refugees from a boat

sinking in a sea of our silence,

murdered each day

by the noise of microphones

and news and sirens.

 

Keep a sharp eye on your politicians.

 

Take note of their expensive suits

and their hidden friends in high places.

Be wary of their rotten deals and their deceit,

their secret meetings in expensive hotels,

make no mistake about their power

and the rise and fall of

their arrogance.

 

Make no mistake,

before it is too late.

 

 

Police them,

in a world with dark clouds now on the horizon

in their subterfuge for our sad sick world.

Police their lies and their greed and their illusions,

take note of their bank accounts

and the rumours they spread

 

safeguard against the harm they do your children,

face the fact some of them never did a hard day’s work

in their lives,

never got their hands dirty

never washed their hands clean of dirty deals

never shook hands with the righteous

never refused a down payment for the future

 

police them and police them well,

…before is too late.

 

Be watchful

the length of this long night.

 

And when you have done all that

You can tell them to just go home.

Tell them their time has come.

Tell them justice has learnt how to speak on its own.

That the truth was never for sale.

Now words no longer need whisper

but can sing and dance

out loud.

 

We who were nobody

are waking from our long sleep…

Then tell them

in their delusions of grandeur

in this darkest of their dark ages

(“…because maybe hate is what we need…” Donald Trump)

the day is coming

– like a light at the end of the tunnel

– like a light at the sharp edge of a lost horizon

– like a promise that could not be betrayed

 

tell them

their

unbearable

outrageous

and immeasurable

catastrophe

 

is coming to an end.

 

 

séamas carraher

2 july 2020 – 31 july 2020

 

 

Notes

 

Image of well-connected and wealthy ‘tyrants’ courtesy of (“fair-use”)  the film Active Measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_(film)#Critical_reception

 

Donald Trump quote from 1989, in reference to the Central Park 5 (https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/07/politics/trump-larry-king-central-park-five/index.html) quoted in Michael Moore’s film, Fahrenheit 11/9

 

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, Ireland, at present. Recent publications include poems in Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, and the Anthology of Irish Poetry.