CHRISTMAS DAY
Was it ever like this?
Reduced to a parched oasis
In Capital’s cultural desert
Tomorrow a promise of true mayhem
Some shops will open at 5 am
An allowance for the need
To satisfy rapacious greed
Happy now to sell and buy us
With their transatlantic virus
their flipside of austerity
highlighting inequality
as X-Box kids still sit and play
Banking barons, miles away
Pull crackers on their sun kissed yachts
Counting dividends on new laptops
Opulent children, rich mothers, dads,
On their state-of-art I-pads.
Celebrate their avarice
Yet some of us still ask;
Can you remember this?
A tangerine, some sweets and nuts
Tin trains and Dinky toys
Dolls for undemanding girls
Popguns for the boys
Plum duffs with hidden silver coins
Paper chains for bright-eyed striplings
Homemade mince pies,
Not Mr. Kipling’s.
Sad but now so very true
That simple Yuletide we once knew
Social innocence, hi-jacked
A frail memory which sadly lacks
The Milk of Human Kindness
When we were all as one
Capitalism’s triumph
Our childhood’s dreams
All gone.
