Fear is always near
And hate is never late.
See courageous men crumble,
See the resolute fall,
Kneecapped by their own doubt.
Those who had once walked tall,
Those who had once stood proud,
Those who would once speak out,
Now, silent and humble,
See them gag themselves, so the loudest can shout,
See them flatten themselves against the ground,
So the strongest can trample the weakest down
And build a wall.
And if you ask: “What’s all that about?”
They’ll say: “But we must.
Our world is broken.
The people have spoken.
They don't know who to trust –
You can’t just let anyone in!”
And you won’t even notice it creep in
That notion that you are no longer “the people”
But the enemy within.
You won’t know whence it came,
That feeling of shame,
That feeling that you are no longer the same,
But a nobody, with no name.
And when the witch-hunts begin
You’ll be joining in...
You too will learn to kneel and pray,
To man-faced gods with feet of clay
And nothing at all will stand in their way.
Until
It will.
Because
It must.
For those self-made gods don’t own you,
And the future they have shown you
Is just an echo of the past.
But no matter what they say,
Who they burn,
Come what may,
The Earth is round,
And it does turn.
Future to the past is bound,
A people lost is a people found.
So at last,
One by one the bricks will crumble,
Inch by inch the girders rust,
And the feet of clay will stumble
And those monuments to hubris,
Fragile egos in concrete cast,
All at once, they’ll be a jumble,
Of smashed fragments in the dust.
Disembodied legs of stone,
That in the desert stand alone,
Unloved, unworshipped and unknown.
As the world streams past,
Talking and singing,
Feet dancing, arms swinging,
A pale hand clasped
In a hand
That's tanned,
Gilded by the sunlight glistening
In the ripples of the sand.
It was thus in the beginning,
And it will be in the end.
...Fear is always near,
And hate is never late.
Vultures circling in the gloaming,
Shadows sweeping ‘cross the land –
Let them fall, and let them be,
But walk tall, and then walk free.
There’s no darkness that can last
In the place where light is cast.
This poem was read at the Manchester for Europe vigil on 31st January 2020 and previously published in the Buzzin Bards 2022: A Manchester UK Poetry Anthology (2023, ISBN 9781955841566)
