GIFT VULTURES! (weekly poem)

GIFT VULTURES!

U.K. Immigration Officials are being rewarded with

gift vouchers for ensuring 70%  of failed asylum

seekers lose their tribunal appeals and so are

sent home to possible torture or even death.

“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” (1)

This soiled latrine that stinks, this septic isle,

This dearth of sympathy, that bleats and jars;

This den, this old fool’s paradise of bile,

This fortress built by Whitehall that debars.

The mean Orwellian state of the mind,

That makes a game of human life or death;

These bureaucrats might be of humankind,

But Homo Sapiens don’t hold your breath.

Of course they’re just obeying those on high,

Those governments, who eying up their votes;

And who’ve set out to slur and vilify,

Whilst cutting corners and thereby some throats.

Why don’t officials get themselves a gun,

Or put a chitty in for Zyklon ‘B’? (2)

If they can’t shoot the poor sods one by one,

Then organise the task industrially.

These apparatchiks and their politics,

Could function with their folders and their phials;

And concentrate on their statistics fix,

Whilst practicing in secret their ‘Seig Heils’.

And all for what? Their shameful, sorry plight?,

So readers of the Mail and Telegraph;

Sleep easy in their beds night after night,

And wake in Airport One for a good laugh. (3)

(1) "King Richard II", Act 2 scene 1. W. Shakespeare.

(2) Cyanide-based poison used in the gas chambers of

Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.

(3) ‘Airport One’: George Orwell’s ‘1984’ name for Britain.

© Richard Layton