Jane Wallman-Girdlestone

Neighbour

By Jane Wallman-Girdlestone

Bewildered, searching, following.

Uncertain who or where,

When or how.

Are you goaded into action

By your fear of the unknown?

Or are you the ‘migrant’ workers the 

Establishment media like to show?

Disconcerting images reach us

In our comfortable insularity.

Observed through a back lit glass,

A dead acquarium of humanity.

Beached, abandoned;

The child in us is speechless at your 

birthed death in our oblong window 

on the world.

You are bartered between nations

Bargaining chips in a poker faced

Denial that no one is to blame.

Thanking gods of superstition

We mumble indignation,

Painfully aware that

There but by the Grace of gods?

There but by a whim of genetics? 

There but by a whisper of 

diplomacy,

An intimate touch from power

Go I.