Grenfell Enquiry, the Guardian
I’m reposting my poem on the Grenfell fire, because the Inquiry reported yesterday.
I wrote this poem two years ago, basing it on the earlier inquiries and everything I could learn about the disaster. I don’t think there’s anything in the poem that’s not borne out by yesterday’s findings.
If
[after ‘If -’ by Rudyard Kipling]
If you would make an ugly thing look shiny, Or make an aged thing look good as new, Or engineer a saving, though it’s tiny, To suit the corporation hiring you; If you would make it pretty from a distance Or come in under-budget by the date, If you would hit your mark and meet resistance By never meeting it till it’s too late; Then you might turn your thoughts to aluminium, Or polyethylene, or PIR, The cheaper stuff professional opinion Knows will burn like fuel but there you are; And once it burns kill any who inhaled it, It being part-composed of cyanide Or, if these compounds took a test and failed it, You might rename them slightly, let it slide; Or, when the troublemakers make their trouble, Prolong the work or pine for luxuries Like water-sprinklers, hallways clear of rubble, Lights that function, fripperies like these, You’ll hear them out but threaten legal action None can fight and if one night in bed They all stay put because of an instruction Meant for buildings where a fire can’t spread – You’re not alone, in fact you’re one of many, Unnumbered are the ways to wink it through; Some are convenience and most are money, Some what we did, most what we didn’t do; Ours is not the world and all that’s in it, Ours is how we live and if we care, Ours is everyone’s last passing minute; Now you can’t say you didn’t meet them there.
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If is published in my book The Big Calls, in which I examined the circumstances or origins of various recent catastrophic events: Grenfell, the retreat from Afghanistan, the 27 migrants drowned in the Channel, the hacking scandal, the uninvestigated murder of Agnes Wanjiru by a British soldier in Kenya, the UK government’s response to and behaviour during Covid, the discharge of infected patients into care homes, the recent legislation to stifle public protest, the recent actions of the Met Police.
I decided to write these poems in forms so well-known and traditional that people who know very little poetry would recognise the sources, poems such as Kipling’s ‘If -’, Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’.
I wanted the poems beloved of the ruling class to be saying in chorus:
WE TOO FIND THIS DISGRACEFUL.
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