traffic

[Benjamin]

the world is a cock-eyed place

full of music and pea green hopes

with boats mad as the moon

and hieroglyphs of suffering

on bartered faces

are lines the depth of ocean trenches

 

and with the summer there comes

a calmer sea to carry them

where a gram of powder

is sold only once-- but the plight

of a refugee

generates income to last for years

[dcmarti1]

Damn!

 

of suffering

on bartered faces

make lines the depth of ocean trenches

 

 

That's a wow. Timely take on timely news.

[Benjamin]

War and poverty cause mass migrations of desperate people who are ruthlessly exploited. Drugs are a plague... but people trafficking is a burgeoning universal problem; with long term implications for an increasingly turbulent and insecure world. Some things just can't be ignored.

[David W. Parsley]

Hi Geoff, this is a good poem addressing a number of issues of current concern. More than a year ago an employee resource group (WINS) at my company brought in someone to speak on the problem of human trafficking. I was aware that Eastern Europe was rife with it and still had not fully assimilated that particular disappointment. Nothing prepared me for the shock of learning that it is rampant in Western Europe and the USA. It was occurring in communities adjacent to the one I worked in: forced labor and prostitution. The organizations engaged in the enterprise have become fiendishly clever, acquiring victims at an early age and rotating from city to city, indoctrinating them to see enforcement and outreach agencies as the enemy. Many are transferred here from other countries, but many are home-grown virtual orphans ejected from failed homes. This is one of the great blights of our time.

 

Thank You for This (I think),

- Dave

[Benjamin]

Thanks Dave. Further to your comments: you might like to check out "World poverty and gumballs" on YouTube. I'd never looked at immigration this way before. G

[dr_con]

A topical and powerful piece! Very Much enjoyed, it is a shadowed part of our modern condition, and although I think the poem is pitch perfect, in your reponse, I have a slight POV quibble- Drugs are not a plague, rather The War on Some Drugs and Some people are a symptom of the plague Which is greed uber alles --- Our voracious and msiguided (and deeply unscientific) war on drugs has created the conditions for untold human suffering throughout Mexico and other parts of the world, it is (partially) the reason we have so much human trafficking coming through our southern borders by our immoral and misguided authoritarian stance on some peoples... (off soap box)

 

Beautiful piece!

 

Juris

[Benjamin]

The negative traits of human nature are increasingly interconnected as the world's population swells. And with its needs.. just as with the global weather systems, we could debate cause and effect endlessly. Drugs, like all science and technology, are exploited; and greed is an abstract word that means different things to different people,ranging from survival to opulence. For nations, possession truly is nine tenths of the law. "Them that's got shall get: Them that's not shall lose!" As Billie Holiday sang.

[dedalus]

The negative traits of human nature are increasingly interconnected as the world's population swells. And with its needs.. just as with the global weather systems, we could debate cause and effect endlessly. Drugs, like all science and technology, are exploited; and greed is an abstract word that means different things to different people,ranging from survival to opulence. For nations, possession truly is nine tenths of the law. "Them that's got shall get: Them that's not shall lose!" As Billie Holiday sang.

 

"Them that's got shall get: Them that's not shall lose!" As Billie Holiday sang. I'll remember this the next time the Japanese and Chinese kick shins over a seemingly desolate and deserted (mineral-rich) island.