JackCade89
By Simon Haines
Your family’s ancestral Dorset seat
covers thirteen thousand acres.
You also still own a sugar plantation
where thousands of black slaves died.
Less than ten miles from your family home,
is Tolpuddle, now a chocolate-box village,
where nearly two hundred years ago,
working men fought to survive.
Those of your class sent six village men
to Tasmania and Botany Bay,
God-fearing farmers, not criminals
who were fighting for better pay.
This lit the fuse and the masses were moved
to demand the release of the Six.
And to prevent revolution, like there’d been in France,
they were pardoned and came back home.
Today we don’t enslave men in
quite the same way, yet poverty persists,
and the gap between you and poor Dorset folk
may be wider than ever it was.
You and your kind survive by giving just a little away,
in order to prevent cataclysmic unrest—
Bread and circuses we like to call it.
But how long can you tough it out?
2
There are thirty-six food banks in Dorset.
Which of these would you choose to frequent
if the tables were turned and you lost everything,
and your family’s blood funds were spent?
This poem is one of the many from the new poetry anthology Shoulder to Shoulder: Poems to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike read the foreword by Sharon Graham here.
