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~ For the universal in today's top stories

Tag Archives: refugees

#120 Bless This House

December 11, 2016

Steph and Matthew Neville, who live in a Christian community in the centre of Birmingham, have a bought a house nearby in order to give it to homeless refugees.

Against better judgement, tawdry is the word that comes to mind
At least to mine – yes, I am that little Lord Snooty.
Faux leather chairs, I note, strictly for watching Strictly
Bathroom suite ‘well used’, acquainted fully with the daily grind.
Of higher things – God, even (Eric) Clapton – there is no outward sign
In shapeless fleece and jeans, less stylish than Primani
Guileless without redress, the new owners are at home already.

Except they shan’t be living there, where they’ve bought ’s for others
And so their love of Jesus Christ is shown in bricks and mortar
Here refugees and homeless, too, they treat them all as brothers
Unreserved, giving boundlessly to those who’ve been through torture.
I know, I know I ought to find this gift of theirs sublime
Yet in their generosity, you see, for me there’s still no rhyme.

#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.

And Not A Drop To Drink

October 12, 2013

They may have tipped it over themselves, rushing to one side of the boat – these boats that have no name, never mind the hundreds crowded onto them – in a pointless attempt to attract the attention of the Coastguard plane flying overhead. Pointless because the plane would not have been there at all, if it hadn’t been dispatched to track the progress of this overcrowded vessel.

Migrants, migrants everywhere, and all they do is sink. Another 50 died yesterday; 300 the week before. Close enough to Italy’s outlying island of Lampedusa for their African bodies to be recovered from the wine dark sea and treated like Europeans – the Europeans they were never allowed to become.

In the makeshift morgue, untidy plastic sheeting – stiff limbs poking out at random – gives way to neat rows of well-made coffins. White ones for the little black bodies of children. An extra large casket for a mother and her new born baby. Umbilical cord still attached, the body of the babe was found inside the dead woman’s leggings.

‘And she wrapped him in swaddling clothes….’

Leggings, jeggings; pushing and shoving. To get on the boat; to get off when it starts to sink. The whole, tawdry business of trafficking and signing up to be trafficked.

Now this: nativity scene drowned out; epic story of Homeric proportions; matter of life and death.

From the outside, it’s difficult to make sense of it. Those orderly rows of coffins which say, in their orderliness, ‘welcome to the EU’ – ludicrous.

Perhaps the survivor who was treading water with his baby in his arms and watched his son drown because he simply didn’t have enough hands – perhaps he knows whether the glass is half full or half empty.

But that’s copping out. How would that man, of all people, be able to achieve a sense of perspective? It should be me, from this distance. read more

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