Poem: To Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher at Ronald Reagan's Funeral (Wiki Commons photo)

Dear Mrs. Thatcher, you ruined your nation, you

set the toffs up as gods to whom you prayed, and

preyed upon the nation's workers, casting their pearls,

made from sweat and tears, before the swine you

courted. You were not a witch; a witch can be

good, but nothing you touched ever shone

with the luminosity of peace and prosperity. No,

everything you touched pulsated with the grasping

of a million millionaire wannabes, of a degraded

uppercrust flaking slowly into oblivion except

for your selfish intervention. Did it do your heart

good to have your minder follow you through

London's public gardens, where, to add the final insult,

you picked our flowers in your insane dotage?

Were I to write your epitaph, it would go like this:

Here lies a woman whose soul was as black and

abandoned as a Cornish mine, whose intelect embraced

only one equation, how to transfer wealth from the poor

and the working to the rich and the feckless.

Somehow, Rest In Peace doesn't seem right as the

closing line for this sentiment. But my heart is not

hard enough, yet, to write what I really mean.

Give it the fullness of time and the functions

of Tories, and doubtless it will be.

Laura Harrison McBride