Coming from the same stamp and type that the English comedienne, actress and monologist Joyce Grenfell parodied, the current Prime Minister and confirmed wheat rapist, Theresa May failed to meet any of the survivors or relations of the June 2017 Grenfell Towers disaster. This poem is my small response:
She didn’t meet them. Cold air
Brought no calm to the fires.
Breezing in she met no one who’s
Suffering and loss was storm loud.
Only police and some of those fire fighters
Whose white flag of surrender
Came in the form of the following days
Neutral cloud.
Our one official placed prime
In the pecking order, as the birds of night
Shrieked through darkness
And the chorus of dawn sang lament,
Briskly walked through the site,
Avoiding the scorn of the shattered
For appearance sake, seeing no one
But marking her own fast descent.
Heaven aimed souls duly stained,
Their representation proved empty.
The void though was measured
As the community gathered close,
Showing at once the death of a system
That does not care if it’s people
Or calls for change meet the smoke.
When a building burns, all the shapes
That we construct to define us
Are seemingly crushed and abstracted,
Reverting at once to the page
That they were first doodled on,
Offering through the pen no protection,
Even as those who write and live still dream of it.
But then heat steals sleep: God’s sick joke.
David Erdos 23/6/17
Illustration Elena Caldera