Honi Soit*

When I was too young to know
'how to read people', I never knew
what was happening behind the faces 
of the adults I did not realise the depths
of my dependence on
-least of all when they spoke in anger.

I naively took at face value
the phrase 'Always tell the truth.',
not realising that in a world of liars
it would make me more defenceless.

When I did not get what others wanted
me to have, when I misunderstood the adults
I was dependent on, to head off my disappointment
before it peaked they said  'I/we fought in the war
for you to have (name the item they said
they wanted me accept instead here)'.

The point now is that they lived through WW2,
but they did not fight it. Many a child was brave
but bravery was in no way equivalent to combat.

I appreciate now how in the slow post-war
economic recovery even living through a war
became 'a sacrifice', even when that life
was far far away from German bombs
and the sacrifice was doing nothing more
than surviving BBC government propaganda.

But still, the greater pains the British people
inflicted, then and since, were reinforcing
poverty and inequality in the name of 'choice',
on scales that are unheroic in the extreme.

We now live by the values of 'the market place'
where we can neither remember nor forget
that making other people suffer for our gain
is the tradeable commodity.

The market for pain and loss
has to be infinite for trade to continue....

*shame be, or evil be, as in 'Honi soit qui mal y pence', shame be on he who thinks ill of this, the Norman French phrase that used to be on British coins