what does it take?
What does it take?
To face fear, to defy desperation,
To leave a home of hundreds of years and more,
To cross wasteland and sea,
To trust as far as money can buy the untrustworthy,
The calculating, the callous;
To gather family and loved ones
And leave family and loved ones,
To pass the watermarks and landmarks of a whole life
For the last time, never to see again
The familiar, the known, the certain,
To set out completely blind and unhinged
From everything that held you in place,
In knowledge, however fearful and desperate,
That you were somewhere you knew where you were?
You have to get out, but every fibre of you
Is in this place and is this place;
But this place is no longer home,
It is prison, it is torture cell,
It is a site of victims' wails,
And you are a breath, a whisper, a pointed finger
From death or worse, and all your loved ones with you -
What does it take?
What does it take
To fabricate fear, to deny desperation,
To malign and to decry, to spurn
And watch the doubly-unhinged burn?
What does it take to stand up in the public places
And call the bravely terrified, the terrifiedly brave
"liars" and "cheats", "malingerers" and "spongers",
"fakers" and "false", "connivers" and "criminals"?
What does it take to separate families
With barbed wire and even crueler ordinances,
To strut before the cameras and spout a doublespeak
So doubled over and turned in on and around
Itself that the language screams "blood", "horror" -
Because of its blandness, its callow reasonableness.
Such language can only be the soft sell of harshness;
The screams undeniable encased within official denial
Louder and louder as denying officials deny softer and softer,
Who call on language so denatured by its official use
It has become useless for anything but official use
Used officially to make truth a casualty as wounded
As only truth can be when lies are smoothed to shape
As truth's official stand-in on those public podiums
Where our guardians stand and protect only themselves -
What does it take?
What does it take
From a country once renowned as the home of fellowship
The wide brown land of wide open arms
And disarming smiles, the land of broad welcome
And long into the night talk and laughter and cheer,
The land that looked outwards to find itself
And saw that where it was and who it was was fine,
And good, a place to live, a place to thrive,
A place to stand in as our own people from wherever we came,
A place shaped by arrivals, successive and enriching,
From 60,000 years on till the latest plane and boat
Arriving, and within them, new arrivals, bringing
Hope and love and courage and desire and skill and will
And family and history and promise and future and bright
Bright expectations to rise, to exceed, to find a place
As placed as they had been in the places they had been,
A new place, a fresh place, a place to set down soft roots
Torn from the hard ground of older places now denied them
Or left behind with sorrow, but left behind because the leaving,
The leaving is a making, a making...
What does it take,
What does it take from us, if we deny,
If we band behind the deniers, denying that we are,
But denying all the same?
Inside, the denial shrivels and shrinks us through and through,
Squeezes out our open-heartedness, and we die as we deny,
We fade as we deny, we are left alive with spite alone to drive us
Further into denial, until we become anyone's fools,
And the professional deniers have made us their instruments
Of pettiness and self-interest, that has nothing to do with us
Except that they can point, the famous men and women,
When the biographers come, to a greater will they did no more
Than serve.
If we do no more, the lie thrives, it blossoms,
Its fetid blooms intoxicate and befuddle us, till we,
Inhabiting a land of freedom and openness and care and concern
Have been made a camp of jailers and torturers,
Our names embossed as Citizen This, Citizen That,
Sponsoring each tearing barb, each slicing edge of wire,
Each tossing thrust of water cannon,
Every clip around an ear, laugh in the face, spurning of aid,
Queue kept waiting, door kept closed, gate made electrified.
That is not us, and that is not this land,
Unless we let ourselves be made this way, trooping deniers,
Unblinded eyes turned away, ears pummelled to insensitivity
By denial, plausible and righteous, easy and comforting.
What does it take?
Do you live here? Has your family always lived here?
Do you know this place? Have you any idea what lies out your door?
Of course you do. You've lived here long enough.
You know this place of all the places you've ever been,
Been around the world and never happier than come home.
That is this land, that was this land, a place of making
And remaking and renewal and unexpected coinings of the familiar,
Where change has come and made us all changed and broader
And new and bright with expectation of the next 'new',
The brighter tomorrow, the times to come of love
And courage and hope and the everyday expectations,
The breath of every day, family and friends and loved ones
And new of all of them, the expected unexpected
Across colour, culture, gender, belief, the thousand differences
That are all the same because difference is the engine
That makes the unfamiliar familiar,
Makes frightening novel and then, as regular
As pizza and felafel and kung fu and bocce and strudel...
And you know exactly what I mean, and how it is,
And how it was, and never really was because was is always,
Always becoming the new is, that is the is that will become
Was, and then is, and doesn't stop, because we are all
Human's being, and the being is us and the being makes us
And the being is enriched by the new us being around
And being new to us and familiar to us and then, us;
And we are all what we are because of what we are,
And the are we are is made by all those who join us
To become, 'sun bronzed we', 'wide brown land we',
'Sweeping plains we', 'tall towering cities we',
The we we all know and know as us and recognise
In every unknown face becoming we by joining us. Then we are
What we were and will be, welcoming we - "join us,
Settle in although at first it will all be unfamiliar,
Frightening, there will be desperate days, unhinging times,
Times when even the horror and fear and imminent shock
Of left-behind home will seem preferable to what you have found:
We've all been there, the great wide land of people we are".
We, us, we must remember how it was and can be,
So that when those new faces, frightened, desperate, appear,
We see ourselves, our selves in a thousand unknown faces,
And in them and in us find the same things,
Love, courage, hope, belief, and desperate trust
That we have all come home.
What little this much takes of us.