Scrap-dealers, tarmackers, hawkers, pickers,
Turning their hand to anything. Questing
Literacy, to silence the mouths of meddlers,
They sell back our leftovers and tell our fortune:
Against Travellers’ Craft the possibility of house-dwellers’
Long-term insecurity in a kin-free zone.
The tottering State, the loitering aimless
Evince the lack of a family-based economy.
For what will the son of the unwaged be doing
Far from Nature, with his settled ideology?
Greeting his mother the earth, his brother
The sky? Preserving his cultural identity?
Will he not lose face? - lose heart, in turn
Becoming a statistic in the unemployment rate?
How will he feel when the grim reaper calls
And life and productivity are smeared in the dust?
Will our society’s ethos and communicable soul
Teach him to value his creative potential?
Or will greed be internalized as acceptable philosophy
And hollow consumption as enviable life-style?
For a golden razor is dehumanizing the poor,
Shaving the heads of alienated felons,
Notching up a street trade in Lethe’s waters,
Cutting the sober with ‘Back to Basics’ ideas,¹
Slicing the heart right out of the family.
9. ‘Deus Pater, dear...’
He made their families like flocks, without honour
In their pens if they hadn’t the heart to gather,
¹ cut = dilute or adulterate, as whisky is cut with water. Whatever “Back to Basics” ideas politicians advocate for a decadent society is a watering down of what is really needed, for the rot is created by the system. “Lethe’s waters” = drugs.