Latest bright idea from the gazillionaires : give everybody in Europe a monthly stipend – say, nine hundred euro. No questions asked, the huddled masses do what they want with the cash. Where will the money flow ? Straight back into the gazillionaires’ pockets of course, for all those fancy goods they’ll go on producing through the plundering of the planet and the killing off of sundry wildlife and peoples. A little war over here, a little  torture and lifetime without parole over there… Who’s the dummy who’ll go on protesting, once he’s got his hush money ? Even if the dummy insists, who’ll even want to hear a single word he says ? « Shut up, » they’ll say, « I’m busy watching the latest episode of Brain Dead. With my virtual reality scope ? Scary real, man. »

To the gazillionaires and their minions: Thanks anyway. I’ll stick with the virtual reality of fiction and poetry, myself.

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

and the immortelles of perfect pitch

and that moment when the bird sings very close

to the music of what happens.

Seamus Heaney

***

Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground Selected Poems 1966-1996, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998