The shame falls on me like showers of hail,
it drums on my burdened head. And I want
it to help me shed my skin and bury me but-
Would I be a whitened sepulchre? Faceless
with my nation’s baseless and graceless way
of torturing small children by turning them
back, rejecting their cries because we are
unwilling to open our arms and welcome
their haunted hurts and necessary needs.
——-
Still, she sits on her petty, priti throne
dishing out her orders that embarrass us,
to keep her figures tidy, while in Europe
the sprawling camps of hungry evacuees
are greeted, warmed, fed by Europeans
not us. The guilt she should be feeling is
pushed into piles of likewise, party papers,
`and the British standard pretends to change
but the shameful truth will ever distress me.
