Grenfell

This police line between them and us
draws a line under things.

And as we shuffle and mill about
at the perimeter of disaster
it reminds me of Hillsborough,
only in so far as it is
yet another instance
of that fault line
which runs through our society,
one more bloody example
where one was more than enough:

the fence line
against which the faces
of doomed football fans
on a Saturday afternoon
press themselves onto the front pages
of our Sunday morning papers;

the front line
along which trenches
and barbed wire decorated with corpses
of school friends machine gunned side by side,
twist and wind over the mud of Flanders,
and across the map of France;

the fault line that shifts imperceptibly
to bring a man-made mountain
down on the heads of the children of Aberfan
while leaving the playing fields of Eton unspoilt;

the bottom line
pulled across our throats like a razor
by wealthy plutocrats, reaching down
from their penthouses high above the law,
levitating 24 storeys above the 24th floor of the inferno
holding us hostage in homes ablaze with poverty,
insisting we share this fate they have decreed,
this austerity they have condemned us to;

the telephone line
over which the voices of the dead are heard,
faltering as they take their last smoky breath,
trying to say goodbye and falling silent,
one night in June;

It draws a line under things. Grenfell must stand
as a charred black tombstone for all the victims
of lies and broken promises, and its fires
must light a beacon in our mind:

a beacon for all the ghosts of dead refugees
sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea,
their fumbling shades still seeking our shores,
groping through the cold dark abyss
as that false dawn filling the London sky
in the early hours of a June morning,
guides them towards those who went before,
now come back to meet them in the grave
and tell them how we burn down their homes
before they can take their place in them,
how we murder hope and all journeys are in vain;

a beacon for all who our society punishes
with poverty and hunger and wars
and catastrophes not of their making;

a beacon that guides all of us
towards a common destination,
one night in June,
to shuffle and mill about
at the perimeter of disaster,
a place prepared for us by neglect and ignorance
and prejudice and greed and cruelty,
waiting just on the other side
of the line between them and us
that draws a line under things,
and in the end none of us will survive this.