TEAR DOWN THE WALLS

I was a child in Wales

Adrift in the aftershocks

Of WW2.

My parents had seen Swansea ablaze

I was told of Auschwitz & Treblinka

So that I carried the knowledge with me

So that NO-ONE

NO-ONE

Would ever have to go through

Those horrors again.

But back in those days

In my child’s mind

There was one thing I never understood.

Why did the Jews and the gypsies,

The gays and the communists

Not run away

And come here to Wales

And live with us?

I asked my mother

I asked my uncle and my granddad.

They smiled

And shrugged

And changed the subject.

I was, after all,

Only a child.

Too young to know of passports

Or of borders and border agencies

Or of national boundaries 

Or of the whole banal evil

Of bureaucracies that can send people

Back to death, starvation and torture

At the flick of a pen.

I had heard of the Berlin Wall

Concrete and barbed wire

There to stop people getting a better life.

And everyone

From the government down

Said what a horror it was

And how communism was evil

A system that could only keep its people in

With walls

And minefields

And how freedom

Is the birthright

Of all humans.

70 years pass

And the walls have gone up

All over Europe

And men, women and children

Are dying again

In their hundreds

Washed up like rubbish

On beaches

Suffocating inside containers

Tear gassed and batoned

By the armies of governments

That are building new walls

Not to keep their people in

But to keep out those

Who are fleeing the wars

Death and starvation

Those same governments

Visited on them.

So do not expect me

To accept your values

You bastards

You hypocrites

You who dare to lecture us

On violence and morality

As you allow tiny infants

To drown

Or boil to death in the backs of lorries

Or are electrocuted to death on railway tracks

Or drop dead

From hunger, exhaustion and heatstroke.

Do not presume

You bastards

To talk to us of morality.

Your conferences are a rogues’ gallery of bloodstained murderers

And we will tear down your walls

With our bare hands and nails if necessary.

These people are our brothers

Our sisters

Our mothers

Our fathers

They are us

And we are them.

Together we will tear down your walls

Tear them down to the ground

Just as we will tear down your palaces and mansions

And your detention centres

And your processing centres

And your concentration canps

And your jails

And if tearing down your whole damn system is what it takes

Then we can do that too.

Solidarity with all refugees.

Touch my brother or sister

And you touch me.

Strike one of us

And you strike all of us.

No more borders

TEAR DOWN THE WALLS