Lest We Forget

 

 

I travelled the endless land

Flat horizon panning out to nowhere,

Vast swathes of land cleared of every tree and bush,

White man desert.

 

And arriving in a town I saw the monument

Like you see in every country town

Commemorating the generations of white men

Who fought in the two World Wars

And many other besides

South Africa, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq…

Bearing the same words like the other thousands of monuments

All over Australia

´Lest We Forget´.

 

Then

I saw the people who once lived out there

On the land, now a white man desert

Who now found themselves marooned

In another kind of white man desert: the modern life:

Suburbs, Mc mansions, shopping centres, SUV´s,

Commercialism, emptiness and glitz……

 

Saw them

Survivors going nowhere with nowhere to go

Bereft of a reason to live, the only country left to them

A haze of drink and drugs

Marooned in a land which no longer made sense.

 

´Lest we forget´.

The fallen, those first people

Driven from one desert to another

By invaders who remembered

Their own dead

Never mind the corpses under their feet.

 

Thank you for looking at my site, cheers, Peter