It’s cheerful to know there’s a generation
who only know: The Men in Black as
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

My mother worked on the radio
she’d give advice, answered agony letters.
But her generation lived in the time of the Dictators,
so powerless and chicken-chick was the Law to stop
the Men in Black: Roman Catholic priests to be exact.
And they told how it was to be … according
to them ******* were forbidden
so she had to hand me, her daughter Valeria
to a nurse, a nun: who’d as much contempt
for my mother, as the shame
that was waiting at home.

Then she very slowly drowned in a fire
of smoke and whiskey.
You just can’t take a child from someone
Not like that. Not because …
someone who once wrote
that someone might’ve once said
suffer the little children.

If it had been any other Corporation —
nailed to the ******* cross.