AFTER MANDELA

AFTER MANDELA

 

There will be no more great men.

The last of their kind are going.

The era of hope has ended,

And in the fast fading light’s last glowing

It is clear the world is too broken to be mended.

 

There will be no more great men.

The dreams of three thousand years

Have evaporated and vanished

And the thinking of great ideas,

Is a mocked thing,

Forever banished.

 

There will be no more great men,

Nor women, no more thinkers of others.

Who would now surrender an entire life

Promoting a world family of sisters and brothers,

A world free of wanting and strife?

 

There will be no more great men

Though the list of those gone is vast,

Those great men and women who dreamed dreams,

Who imagined a world that at last

Could bathe in light’s eternal beams.

 

They came from many times and lands,

(those who imagined a world holding hands).

They spoke many languages, they had different ways,

But essentially they all had the same thing to say:

 

There is no need for hunger

There is no need for pain

There is no need for any

To sleep out in the rain.

There is no need for hatred

There is no need for war.

There is no need to ponder

What life is for.

There is no need for all the ills

That afflict the world now.

There is no need to wonder-

We’ve been told the why and how.

 

In so many ways this message was dreamed-

Spoken out loud, written down, and sung.

Around the earth this certain light streamed,

Probably from when it all first begun.

 

But the light is fading now, the ideas flicker out.

Humanity stumbles in the dark, living in doubt.

No-one dreams these dreams any more

And of course it is fashionable to mock the poor.

 

Deride the poor, deride the ill,

Deride the homeless, deride those who care still.

Justify hatred, justify war.

Vilify the strangers at your shore.

Care not for others, laugh at their pain.

Kick the old woman asleep in the rain.

 

The time of ideas is past-

Now we must make money-fast.

 

Instead of ideas we have economic equations,

Monetarist mumbo-jumbo, fiscal hoo-doo.

The creed of the inequality of nations.

Be judged by what you own, not by what you do.

To care and share, that is a vice,

You’ll be ridiculed if you try to be nice.

To want the best for others is a cause for derision,

And they’ll say you’re insane if you have that sort of vision.

 

For decades there has not been a fine thought,

We all blink at the sound bites instead.

No-one listens to what the great ones taught-

The age of hope is dead.

 

The world is ruled now by little people,

Politics, business, they’re all the same.

Weak-minded automatons whose wits are feeble,

No fibre at all, and shredded mush for brains.

They strut the stage of the TV screen,

In a sound bite they tell us all that they know.

You can see their clones wherever you go-

They have made a virtue of being nasty and mean.

“leader”, “tycoon”, “entrepreneur”, “magnate”.

Each and every one of them below fifth rate.

Puffed-up, self-important, contributing nought,

Claiming glory

In the latest news story,

Terrified at the chance someone may have a fine thought.

Greedy, grubby, self-serving little trolls-

You probably know who I mean-

They strut the small stage  of the world right now,

But in a century there will be no trace they have been.

 

The last of the great ones are going.

Ever dimmer shines the fading light’s glowing.

No great women, no great men, no carers, no strivers.

Count only the losers, and the few survivors.

 

The last of the great ones are going,

Three millennia of hope is finished,

The door has been closed on knowing,

And humanity is forever diminished.

 

That time when hope shone bright and clear-

Do you remember it then?

But now all is dark, sombre and austere-

There will be no more great men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Denham Cole]

Lucky we have Richard Branson