Election In Wartime

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 221, 17 September 1943, Page 7

Election In Wartime

I Fad barrage opens. The long words rumble Like guns on the shattered ear. The claim And the counterclaim ramble Over the No Man’s Land of the home. The radio is the listening post. Every station is the enemy. The parties are locked fast like armies. They are not friendly; they are not themselves By a fireside, talking; they are belligerents Wading deep in the mud of their hate. They are parched in the deserts of their ambition. They fite words like bullets into the bodi ies Of their victims. Abuse is a wound. AP yet it’s all so easy! It is so easy to give to the extraordinary lie The simple truth. For what we want Is neither remarkable nor strange; Nothing that you have not already heard, Listening at midnight to the tick of your heart, To the noise of the traffic in Parliament Square, To the memory of the turned furrow following the plough On the farm where you were born, Of the day you took your first job In the office or the engineering shop, Or followed sheep round the lazy road where the horse stopped, Tired in the hot ,afternoon of the noise and dust. LL we want is to live. To live decently. Not just to exist. To live securelv, with food in our mouths and houses That the sun can enter without making us ashamed; To gts a Mogg to do that we can do To ss able. ‘to rear children decently. To have leisure. '‘HAT’S all we want. And if'you can’t give us that You can keep your figures and your long words And your ballyhoo. You can keep your Incomes And Expenditures and your blah blah. You Can juggle your astronomical figures to rire wey Come. You cut no ice. ? y Ai sasalied something you’ve got to reme: ; eagen the meaning of Democracy to Vis cell Dinahentp ik cnt 6 Geen it’s a man; A free man, with food in his nie and clothes on his back. Sale in ane dose ga cin don’t aii each We nae asks enough.

Anton

Vogt