They asked the people once before
In nineteen sixty-seven:
Shall we, the migrant ones
Give this ancient other
The right to vote and be acknowledged
As more than human fauna?
They ask the people yet again
In twenty seventeen:
Shall we the broader mass
Give these folk, the queer kind
The right to wed
With chattels and children and property to pay?
Strange. There is no survey, no plebiscite
When war descends.
No need for surveys, nor plebiscites
When company tax is shed.
Neoliberal governance has its quirky ways
And human rights are febrile things:
The declared and the liveable
Tussle with each other
In their triumph and despair
In their hope and negation.
Granted
they become taken for granted.
Resisted
They swell into resistance.
In this seigneurial salvation
Gifted by the ‘gods’
Rights, queer and ancient, may be granted
For the humble and the patient.
Not the refugees and the children
Who are daily fed abuse
By the violence and the famine
The stalks the weary globe
By the shaft of climate change
That tilts the world on its slippery praxis.
Strange. The relativity of human rights
Rests securely
In the barometric curve of neoliberal climes.
Death empowers the legally married:
The minister and the family
Snatch the body from the unwed lover.
O bounteous land
Let all combine with Tory might
The right to be unhappy!
Once again, we return to the past
Pre-franked, the postman knocks
Technologies denied. Strange.
God stamps his foot.
Enough he cries:
“let you without sin cast the first stone”
And he was stoned alive!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/same-sex-marriage-postal-survey-greenlit-by-high-court/8881956
Gar Jones: September 2017
In nineteen sixty-seven:
Shall we, the migrant ones
Give this ancient other
The right to vote and be acknowledged
As more than human fauna?
They ask the people yet again
In twenty seventeen:
Shall we the broader mass
Give these folk, the queer kind
The right to wed
With chattels and children and property to pay?
Strange. There is no survey, no plebiscite
When war descends.
No need for surveys, nor plebiscites
When company tax is shed.
Neoliberal governance has its quirky ways
And human rights are febrile things:
The declared and the liveable
Tussle with each other
In their triumph and despair
In their hope and negation.
Granted
they become taken for granted.
Resisted
They swell into resistance.
In this seigneurial salvation
Gifted by the ‘gods’
Rights, queer and ancient, may be granted
For the humble and the patient.
Not the refugees and the children
Who are daily fed abuse
By the violence and the famine
The stalks the weary globe
By the shaft of climate change
That tilts the world on its slippery praxis.
Strange. The relativity of human rights
Rests securely
In the barometric curve of neoliberal climes.
Death empowers the legally married:
The minister and the family
Snatch the body from the unwed lover.
O bounteous land
Let all combine with Tory might
The right to be unhappy!
Once again, we return to the past
Pre-franked, the postman knocks
Technologies denied. Strange.
God stamps his foot.
Enough he cries:
“let you without sin cast the first stone”
And he was stoned alive!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/same-sex-marriage-postal-survey-greenlit-by-high-court/8881956
Gar Jones: September 2017