A Tribute to Decency

 

If it were not for this patch of land

This small part of God's vast creation

Amongst a desultory but decent people

I would be lying in some back street

Having been raped by a broken bottle

Or murdered and deposited in a field

Where the harvest had yet to be reaped

Or thrown from the highest building

I live, exist only by grace in a place of little space

But whose peope have anointed my soiled face

I live not in Chechnya, Uganda or Iran

Where my end would be violent and cursed

Places of no compassion bereft of progress

and full of bigotry

I have run the race of life to my resting place

Grateful to my compatriots for their forebearance

and tolerance

Who only fifty years ago persecuted and imprisoned me

Que sera, sera