Sunday, 3 May 2009

Bookshelf

Forces in victory

Write history.

The stories from the vanquished

Are forgotten and vanish.

The views we are seeing

Are mostly European.

Hidden away from bookshop shelves

Lie tales no one tells.

Ask the Herero people how European's tried

To rid Africa of them in a genocide.

Voices call for a British spirit

With only room for whites within it.

 Recollections of the Blitz mentality,

Overlook the inequality

Suffered by men and women of the Caribbean.

The British West Indies Regiment was seeing

2000 casualties in World War One.

A war you'd think only the white man won.

Hitlers tyranny

Had no sympathy

For dark skin.

Unknown the numbers of black deaths within

Nazi  camps of concentration

Or Germany's policy of mixed race sterilisation.

African American GI's suffering a disparity of executions

Compared with whites (who also did the shooting).

Two thousand women of the Maasai

Told by courts that they lie

When claiming they were raped

By British soldiers in their own state.

Stories which lack prominence.

Many through a lack of evidence.

Yet one thing we know of western cultures

Is they document facts like data vultures,

But still we have to push and prise,

To open the truth of history's eyes.

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