the guardians

The Guardians


The big supermarket with a bell tower that chimed
at regular hours but not now after midnight, looked
like space ship in a vast car park, and the dog that
lived in field not yet covered in concrete, where one
could find bicycle pumps, if you needed one and
searched long enough, had stopped barking, why it
had done so in the first place not even it knew, it was
now looking for food, as were illegal emigrants,
near the bins, wary of uniformed sentinels who took
it upon themselves to stop the hungry getting food
that was wasted anyway. They, the nocturnal guards,
is capitalism’s triumph, low paid men doing their
dirty deed, spraying bleach on dumped food to stop
the poor from eating it.