To Be Or What… Poem by Adrian Wait

To be…or what?
That is on the table
Choice of fear or hope
To finance a fleet of subs
Twenty-one billion pounds
Or to care for the elderly,
The vulnerable and the sick
Invest in hope, and life
Divest through fear, and death
More profit in death and war
Conform or transform
A just society, the choice
Choice, is ours so they say
Poverty and war always with us
Divisions ensure power and profit
No more the self-delusion
Jerusalem never builded here
The disengaged cudgel
Held by the disengaged
Taken from the hands
Of the poor, the vulnerable
Helped sustains the helper
Philosophies cost paid in full
Take up a poverty march
Wear a wristband or to listen
Twenty-one billion for WMD
Voice of the voiceless – Speak
One WMD – Circus of Green
Disbanded, conferences curtailed
Seminars are the seed encased
Never planted always reviewed
Disengagement… none so deaf
To treat with dignity of the least
Comfortable in their illusions
Attending meetings talking talk
Buffet and expenses obscene
Outside the winter chills
Isolated in silence hope is crushed
Looking in at the feast of words
A million, millions words are spilt
Upon the page no one reads
Undiscovered heart of reason
Mistakes indifference for objectivity
Confuses change with action promised
Such travellers lost to self-deceit
Muddles the brain with spin
The insolence of politicians
Unworthy in speech and deed
Controls the crowd and myths
Justice betrayed by propaganda
Divide and rule, so easy still
It is a weary life of the heart
Compassion framed as bitterness
Anger portrayed as envy
Chains of conformity ensure
Focus on our future pension instead
Indifference masked by objectivity
Blind to the interdependence of life
The harvest is great the workers few
Something is rotten at the heart of power
We bear the ills we have in our distractions
Rather than answer the call and follow
To be…or what shall we ever know
Conscience makes cowards of us all.
Silently, hope is slain with indifference.