Atos Kills (A Sort of Sonnet)

Since I left the UK for Sardinia I've been keeping in touch as best as I can with everything that's going on back home. Few things have touched me, or made me as angry and indignant, as what appears to be happening to very sick and disabled people who are having their benefits taken away as a result of a very crude test by ATOS called the Work Capability Assessment. It astonishes me that very senior politicians like Cameron, Grayling, Osbourne and Duncan Smith are turning their backs on the fact that a large number of people, who have been found fit for work as a result of a WCA test, are dying shortly after the test (something like between 32 and 73 a week depending on what figures you believe.) It's as though these politicians wish to pretend that this tragedy isn't happening. Here's a poem I've written about it:-

Atos Kills (A sort of sonnet)

ATOS kills, or so they say,
The tragedy and distress,
Subterfuge, unholy mess;
It's like a William Shakespeare play.
The laws of decency can't apply
To sufferers of cancer, heart disease
Or schizophrenia, if you please;
Found fit for work and then they die.
"Zero points. Go get a job!
If you die it's hardly worse
Than sponging off the public purse
You weak, pathetic, scrounging slob!
Just think of all the dosh we'll save
While you are resting in your grave."

Geoff Davis © 2012

Opening Stanza from Choruses from "The Rock" by T S Eliot

To date I have been using this blog in order to share my own work but there's something so profound and beautiful about these words of T S Eliot that I felt compelled to share them -


Opening Stanza from Choruses from "The Rock"

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965),
The Rock (1934)

http://www.wisdomportal.com/Technology/TSEliot-TheRock.html 

Animal Sense

This is a poem, from my smallpress collection Behind The Mask, that a lot of people seemed to like.