Your fortune, my inherited table,

our DNA;

We are all in this together:

our group pain and loss,

ignorance and greed

along with the inclusive shame

of collective ownership and history.

 

I ponder on that history -

beside the principles - all the things,

ill-gotten fruits, taken and given

without any by-your-leave.

I ponder at my hundreds year old

chunk of Cuban forest:

what creatures once resided

 in its lovely branches, now extinct?

What axe, wielded by whom

bought it crashing down?

Their story, my story.

 

Even here and now

There is real-time memory of nameless folk, huddled in back-yards

cared for like goats and camels are.

They were technically free(d)

but had no-where else to go.

In the archives, find a chatty letter

written home to Papa and Mama

from the sweltering, stolen lands

ending: “must go now to find a suitable branch to hang that rascal from”.

In the pretty silver spoon

spun from Irish famine

 - that now feeds fat babies;

in the honourably saved pennies

buying our welfare, my roof, your bread.

Every breath enabled by concupiscence

...who is not complicit?

 

If we were to seek account

for every wrong and trespass

to bemoan and rant for revenge

or compensation, down the centuries,

dredging  the racial subconscious

for evidence and witness,

what then?

An eternity, to judge each one?

Pass sentence across the generations,

usurping Godly prerogatives,

forgetting  what  true reparation means.

How the turn-about of victim to abuser

so easily comes-about

without forgiveness. See Ruanda.

Flippant gestures of reconciliation,

political spin spun to procrastinate,

platitudes to blandish and wheedle,

all change nothing and amount to naught

or

we can choose to release it all

to the firmament and hallowed ground

-  wide-eyed, out of knowingness

love-borning.