Dedicated to Harold Pinter, who’s been kind enough to bless us (or the Guardian) with his poetic wisdom, here is a poem inspired by his own latest work.
Here they go again,
The Euroliterati in their sackcloth parade
Chanting their ballads of doom
As they bleat across the big world
Damning whatever America’s doing at the moment.
The gutters are clogged with the dead from the regimes they support:
The Bosnians in Yugoslavia
The Kurds in Iraq
The women in Afghanistan
The dissenters in Cuba
The students in China
The citizens of North Korea
The prisoners in the gulags
The ones who worked in the wrong office buildings on the wrong day in New York.
The has-been poets use words to try and cut.
Their heads are full of sand
Their ideas a pile of dirt
Their idols stained and dusty
Their bright lights have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of their dead theories
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of their impotent fury.
Thank you. I’ll be here all week …
Excellent!
Thanks. I’m sure I’ll never make a living writing poetry — but perhaps that’s a good thing.