Monday 12 February 2018

re. Oxfam scandal, re. UN scandal

re. Oxfam re. UN

In light of the recent and lamentable revelations regarding Oxfam I’m posting a poem about similar events involving the UN, lest we forget that this is a broader issues that goes beyond one organisation. This poem was first published by Thank You For Swallowing in their September 2016 issue (Thank You For Swallowing ). https://thankyouforswallowing.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/sept161.pdf

                                          New Hues of Blue
             UN accused of ‘gross failure’ over alleged sexual abuse by French troops.
Owen Bowcott

Under an Air Superiority sky, shaded
by Steel Blue wings of splayed, corroded metal, we’re grounded on teal terrain, nesting in tents of distressed
Bleu de France.
We call our home M’Poko, an indigo mizzen peopled by soft-centred periwinkles, stuck to the underbelly of the Central African Republic.
Blue-Eared Glossy-Starlings, circling midnight skies, flock here. Sharp-eyed, resourceful – an adaptable species. Hooked beaks thrust under makeshift shelters, stealing our young. The baby-blue and Alice-hued, our vulnerable juveniles pecking a living amongst the rotting and moribund.
Under logos of doves, the innocents
are schooled in a spectrum of lessons
by teachers cloaked in heraldic Azure mantle. Studies of pounding scant pounds of flesh, while furnace-hot hands roast to smalt fragile cobalt bodies, hollow bird-light bones.
Here is home economics for the homeless, strong and weak deals – abiding ordeals – taught by rote, of selling bodies to eat. These birds are the Zaffre, the impure, within the cleft of a double olive branch.
They leave lasting impressions, violet-blue bruises tattooing tender skin, where vermillion blood money mingles with
fetid waves of displacement blues. New
hues to cover the whole picture in this palm- greased wasteland.