#123 Psalms for the Signing of an Executive Order on Immigration

January 29, 2017

(1)

Let us pray on his behalf, O Lord, since he does not know the extent of his weakness.

His is the Power. With the stroke of a pen. But the President’s signatures are as overstated as his blow-dried yellow hair.

With twirly curls and BIG LETTERS, the President writes upon the world the way a child places himself in it (The White House….The Earth, The Solar System, The Universe).

All the while pouting, droopy-eyed, for the cameras, as young women pucker up and glare down for endless selfies.

He knows (or shows) it not, O Lord, but this is Old America weakened by 60 petulant years of never having to grow up.

(2)

If given to prayer, I would……

For the Iraqi interpreter who was allowed in eventually. Having clasped the many hands of Uncle Sam’s finest, then clapped in irons at JFK.

For the medical student and her tight-lipped smile, hardly daring to believe, not risking anything as her father made it through Immigration on a waiver.

For the wizened old Muslim man barred by riot cops from handing out free pizzas to airport protesters (‘pizza pies’, as New Yorkers continue to say, native or not).

For the known unknowns, prevented as of 4.42pm EST Friday 27 January 2017 from showing their face in the American West; and all the unknown unknowns, who now will never even apply.

#115 Refugees At Halloween

October 30, 2016

If there were wounds it would help.
As victims – see, he bleeds – we could welcome them.
Or gashed with plastic and fake blood applied with a make-up brush,
At least then we’d know they really are The Walking Dead.
‘Keep the zombies out,’ we’d shout. ‘Don’t give them a home.’
‘A refugee’s not just for Halloween.’

Instead of ambiguous, they might have made themselves more obvious.
Don’t they realise, it’s the open-ended we don’t know how to hack?

Whether the under-18s kicking a ball about in the temporary territory
Set out for them by French police, will bring with them
The wreckage of their camp – nothing but a plague upon our houses.
Or, supposing they’re allowed to come, perhaps they’ll add
A dash of something different. Not guttersnipes at all,
But popping up in Shoreditch as readily as
They’ve taken to their new container quarters.

We might look at this as the chance to overcome our own uncertainty….
Or not.

#104 Sketches From The Silly Season

August 31, 2016

By now his foot is in the rescue boat; his Europe starts here. Part-lifted, part-pulling himself out of the overcrowded inflatable. Fine features, full lips, corkscrew hair. Eyes closed perhaps out of modesty – no self-respecting young man should be seen succumbing to the embrace of the broad-shouldered Spanish coastguard. No worries, though. Only the same as hand-on-head whenever a perp gets into a police car.

Still sitting in the dinghy that’s just far enough off the Libyan coast for a credible distress call, among the many, far too many tightly packed in, two men next to each other, one grinning, the other grimacing as they watch the younger man going aboard the Spanish vessel. There are hundreds more migrants to be carried over before their turn comes.

Sitting, squatting, hardly anything to eat, doing nothing except trying not to get sick. For the ones that didn’t get away, every wasted day in Libya’s internment camps, surely seems interminable.

Would-be escapees hidden in warehouses and farm buildings. Valuable human cargo, although from the smugglers’ handling, you wouldn’t think they’re worth more than 10 cents.

Perhaps a quarter of a million trying to get in; or maybe as many as 800,000 (least conservative estimates from the most conservative sources). Either a Carthaginian army set to invade Rome; or the population of a small city, lying listless in the sun like elephants with their tusks removed.

Blocks of seats in the civic sports centre painted in different shades, giving the fleeting impression of a stadium filled with spectators sporting opposing team colours. But this is China’s New Ordos, rich in resources including rare earth metals, the ‘ghost city’ built for a million Mongols to live in but only a hundred thousand turned up. read more

#60 Migration Watch (4): What A Carry On

September 15, 2015

And what are reporters for?
Without the need to know of far-flung dominions
To formulate opinion, acting in unison with decisive effect.

Goodbye to all that. But haven’t you said there’s more for journalism to do?
Something about a drowned boy and a moment of integrity
Constructing what we have in common.
Doubtless you didn’t mean for it to draw a virtuous circle of patrons and their profugees (refugees deemed worthy protégés by Western benefactors);
Minus the mucky migrants not much mourned.

Nothing more to be said, then. Even ‘fail better’ was said better the first time.
In the end there is only blind determination to keep on looking;
Seeing as we are the sum of how it doesn’t add up.

O what a carry on – migrants for carrion, is this all you can do?
O what a carry on – migrants for carrion, this is what I do.

#59 Migration Watch (3): Three-Way Street

September 6, 2015

1. East to West

Swaddled in tin foil, stranded on the seawall straddling Italy and France, refugees from 1970s glamrock, obviously. Or perhaps Gregor Samsa’s younger siblings: insects already; further metamorphosis forbidden.

Salt-blasted and skin peeling after days at sea in an open boat, the girl’s face is patterned like a leaf.

Three proud women on the beach at Kos, pointedly not looking at the photographer. Mother suckling her baby, then grandma in the middle; at her side the younger daughter with film star’s pout. All told, three pairs of lips pressed firmly together in a silent snub – thumbing the eye of the camera.

The logo painted on the side of the refrigerated lorry shows slices of ‘Hyza: honest chicken’ (pretty in pink), twirled round to resemble a rose. By any other name….. Butthe cooling system had died, and putrid liquid was seen dripping from the back of thevehicle. Next morning, the ‘coffins’ sent in to contain human remains were more like sealable sinks.

2. Wessies to Essies

A warm welcome they made of it: the German townspeople of Oer-Erkenschwick setting a precedent, greeting their coach load of migrants with cheery sunflowers; among them burly bloke in hi-vis vest – Westphalian version of white man van, standing firm against what’s expected of his xenophobic type (supposedly)

3. West to East And Back Again

Zahera Tariq and her four children had exited England via London City, the upmarket airport designed for business travellers. But they were brought back in through thebreeze blocks of down-at-heel Luton, where Burger King counts as fine dining. Alleged to have been migrating to IS before she was stopped and detained in Turkey prior to repatriation, Mrs Tariq may not have noticed the difference. Appearing at Camberwell Magistrates’ Court charged with child abduction, piety was her paramount concern: she refused to stand when Judge Susan Green entered the courtroom, saying her religion required her to sit. Speaking of child abduction, the four smaller Tariqs have been taken into foster care, even though the husband and father was the one to blow the whistle on where they were going. read more

#58 Migration Watch (2): For Theresa, UK Home Secretary

August 21, 2015

May you never lay your head down, face down in the wine-dark sea. May you never lay your head down in the hold.

You’re just like a great Big Brother to me, the Secretary for Sending Me Home. You’re just like a great Big Sister to me, the Minister for Beating Me Back.

So what would you, what would you have her do? Send in the clowns – a hand to hold instead of the strong arm of the state? Meanwhile, Britain’s home grown working class – feeling the pressure of the next wave, ‘white trash’ under fire from incoming – would be left out in the cold, presumably.

On 20 August UK Home Secretary Theresa May signed an agreement with French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve setting up a new centre from which to command joint operations to control migrants seeking to cross the Channel into England.

During a tour of the Eurotunnel site in Coquelles, Mrs May explained that the control and command centre will prioritise the relentless pursuit of people-smuggling gangs.

Her emphasis on trafficking may have been designed to draw attention away from the plight of the migrants themselves. Thousands are currently sleeping rough in a camp outside Calais known as The Jungle.

Many of the migrants making their way to Western Europe have already borne the brunt of civil war and economic collapse following the long wave of failed Western foreign policy interventions stretching from Africa to Afghanistan. Mrs May chose not to suggest that events which served to put migrants in the hands of ‘callous’ people smugglers, were often made in the West.

May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold.

May you never make your bed out in the cold.

(with apologies to John Martyn)

#57 Migration Watch (1): Anomalies

August 9, 2015

This is the male that walks the tunnel, crosses the Channel, caught on camera.
Arrested attempting a life left in peace.

Splayed against the wall, 40-year-old Sudanese migrant Abdul Rahman Haroun is desperate to stay out of the slipstream of yet another train thundering through at more than 100 mph.

After more than 10 hours in the tunnel, has he got used to this? Or would he crucify himself if only he had a hammer?

On 4 August Rahman Haroun was picked out by Eurotunnel’s monitoring system and recorded as an ‘anomaly’ in ‘interval 5’. Picked up and detained as he approached themouth of the tunnel on the Kent coast, currently remanded in custody he is due to appear at Canterbury Crown Court on 24 August charged with causing an obstruction under the Malicious Damage Act 1861.

This is a cat to catch the mice, gone in a trice down the hole.
And on to Merrie England where the streets are paved.

He can’t find it in himself to blame them – the French police officer deployed to catch migrants trying to make it from Calais to the UK.

He sleeps all day and wakes when they do. He too is away from home, encamped with brother officers in a tent city that mirrors the migrants’.

‘We’re all migrants, now,’ he quips, forgetting that the mirror is always shinier than thereal thing.

#53 Cargoes 2015

April 19, 2015

Rubber boat from Libya en route to Malta
Butting in to winds and waves of wine dark sea
With a cargo of Africans
Crammed in, jammed on
Hopeful helpful Europe will set them free.

Loud colours, cotton print lifeless in the water
Floating not yet bloated from the wine dark sea
With a cargo of cadavers
Waived quietly on their way
Who cares what colour dead turns out to be?

Scooping up survivors is a white man’s burden
Face masks and boiler suits, colour coding’s clear
With cargoes of Africans
Still more cargoes of Africans
Healing and helping hands giving way to fear.

(with apologies to John Masefield)

#29 Price of Travel

August 20, 2014

‘Tempted? You’re only human’.

When 35 Afghan migrants were considering whether to pay their way into Tilbury – theUK port downriver from London, their travel agent aka human trafficker may have mentioned the North Sea crossing from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge; but failed to inform them of the P&O website offering ‘up to £320 free spending money’ on selected cruises.

Having paid the price of a fortnight’s cruising – exclusive yet all-inclusive (there you go, P&O, you can have that tagline for free), the stowaways completed their journey in a sealed container on board the P&O cargo ferry Norstream; with no opportunity for ‘café hopping and boutique shopping’ en route.

Amateur footage shows 34 of them shortly after the container was prized open at 6.30am on Saturday, around 18 hours after they were sealed into it. Circled by Port ofTilbury personnel in high visibility vests (motto: ‘safety first’), mostly sitting on the floorof a dockside holding area (yellow arrows and industrial paint in the manner ofManchester’s Hacienda club); variously howling, mewling, having difficulty breathing – except for the teenage girl in red shalwar kameez, who is standing calmly to one side, holding on tight to a matching canvas school bag.

Their faces have been blurred beyond recognition. But it’s clear who owns the clip: ITN; and the fee for further use is £699.

Missing from the group photo is 40-year-old Meet Singh Kapoor, who was declared dead after his young son failed to wake him on arrival. Mr Kapoor entered Tilbury in one box and left in another.

Shortly afterwards, the surviving stowaways were dispersed to three different hospitals across Greater East London: one group was taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, London E1; another to the ‘university hospital’ in the post-war new town of Basildon; and a third group to Southend hospital. read more

Immigration Satus

February 9, 2014

Neat hair, neat features, neatness itself; but immigration minister Mark Harper has resigned over the untidy business of his cleaner’s visa. She doesn’t have indefinite leave to remain and he’s the employer who really should have vetted her more carefully, being also the minister in charge of doubling the fine for failure to check; and the government immigration spokesman who sent the vans round last summer saying ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’.

Neat, neat, not-so-neat. Interviewed, he never misses a beat. I did this, I did that, I should apply a higher standard to my own behaviour. Therefore…..
No traction in his seamless voice. Smooth words from a Teflon talker. But if his ministerial career is remembered at all, it will be for the sticky end.

Meanwhile a young male giraffe called Marius was put down in Copenhagen Zoo this morning in an effort to prevent in-breeding among giraffes in captivity.

Photographed poking his head towards us, Marius the Lugubrious – except this is only us projecting human characteristics onto a dumb animal, now deceased.

When various zoos, including one in Doncaster, were keen to adopt Marius, there was never any concern about his immigration status.
Though the Copenhagen keepers cut up the corpse and fed it to the lions, in this regard Marius was afforded more humanity than Mark Harper’s cleaner.

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