If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days (a sensible choice, given the way the world’s going) then you’ll have missed the inglorious spectacle of Space Karen, at the inauguration of Orange Bloat, making a Nazi salute. Following which, all the usual vapid suspects defended it as being ‘awkward’ or ‘not really Nazi’, carefully side-stepping (or should that be goose-stepping?) the fact that seeing this gesture made on the largest stage possible will have given heart to the worst kind of racist and extremist, who will have seen their poisonous ideology being validated, and feel further emboldened.
What to do? Write a poem to keep up morale among those of us who have no time for oligarchs and fascists, obviously.
Both Yorkshire Bylines and CultureMatters have chosen to publish my piece ‘come now, my brothers’, which you can read by clicking on their names above. As always, I’m profoundly grateful to them for giving my work a platform, and I urge you to visit their respective webpages so they can see there’s an audience for well-crafted political poetry. Hopefully that’ll mean they continue to share it. And feel free to share the poem as widely as you wish.
Hang tight, folks. Better days will come. We may just need to fight for them a little. Oh, and I’ll probably add the poem to this website in the next few days as well. Look after yourselves and I’ll see you soon.