Good News

First the soldiers,
then the boys,
then politicians
threw out their toys,
followed by children
in their hundreds (and thousands),
then lovers
took the old path up the mountains
and met there the hungry ghosts
of things we'd forgotten:
skeletons we'd buried
of babes misbegotten
and the crowd roared against them
and formed a militia
to burn down the house
of Dick and Patricia,
whilst mother and father
got ready for bed
securing the gas mask
on baby's head
to ward off bad dreams
of fast food outlets
and real life Barbies
and cigarette adverts,
but the cat spent all night
dying under the table
for drinking the tap water,
which was atomically unstable,
although no one knew
any of these things for sure;
the BBC
won't report anymore,
at least not in Britain or China
(it's banned)
lest they bite their owners
or the government's hand.

Buried at the bottom
of the heap, this mess,
lies a host of truths,
nothing less
than a plethora of acts
to which angels bow their heads in shame
for doing so little
in their creator's name:
Man has stood upon the moon
a conquerer, a giant;
we built castles and bridges
and toppled the odd tyrant;
mapped oceans and jungles,
star systems and deserts;
invented our science
and proclaimed ourselves experts;
Civilisation -
that was us too,
and with it came language
and trade and taboo,
morality, madness
and sure, there were wars,
but when it all ends
it's the peace that endures
and expands
to encompass us all,
so that colour, gender, creed
nor sexuality may forestall
the divine right of the human,
and by that I mean you,
who in hearing this poem
knows my point of view,
or point of reference, rather,
for what I'm trying to say
deep down
is that, at the end of the day,
even a bad one,
a difficult week, month or year
the words
that everyone's desperate to hear

are

Good News.