Drain the Swamp
Alan Morrison
 
Now white supremacists are doing Nazi-style salutes
To Donald Trump, sieg heil-ing in Washington DC
Quite openly for all to see on mobile phone footage –
Not blue collars or rust-belt rednecks but dapper
Men in sharp suits, Hugo Boss wardrobed businessmen –
Self-made plutocratic products of the globalization
Of capitalism that they promise to stamp out from
The nation on behalf of those who feel left behind,
Whom they left behind to fill up their carpet-bags
To spilling point, now they’ll find a place for them,
The put-upon lumpenproletariat of the United States,
Simply by dumping on numberless of their own
Compatriots: immigrants, foreigners, homosexuals,
People of colour, Mexicans, Blacks, Moslems,
Native Americans, and in their place will come
New opportunities for blue collars and red necks
Of the dispossessed rust-belts and dustbowls who’ll
Dust off the cobwebs of those pointy white hoods,  
While the white supremacists rampantly promote
Their race of Aryan evangelicals in a bid
To “make America great again” – but what that means
Depends on how many memes make five and on what
Humpty Dumpty Trump says and whatever it means –
All America waits to see if he’ll drain that swamp,
Build that wall, or make a mount out of a hill of beans…
 

Alan Morrison is author of several critically praised poetry collections including Keir Hardie Street (Smokestack, 2010), Captive Dragons (2011), Blaze a Vanishing/ The Tall Skies (2013; both Waterloo) and Shadows Waltz Haltingly (Lapwing, 2015). His epic polemical poem-in-progress, Odour of Devon Violet, can be sampled at www.odourofdevonviolet.com. A new collection themed around the welfare cuts, Tan Raptures, is forthcoming from Smokestack in April and can be pre-ordered via: http://www.fishpond.co.id/Books/Tan-Raptures-Alan-Morrison/9780995563506.

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