SHELL SHOCKED

The recent news story of the tragic deaths of 39 illegal immigrants from Vietnam found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Essex brings to mind another terrible incident back in 2004 when 21 illegal workers, all Chinese, were drowned by fast-rising tide whilst cockle-gathering in Morecambe Bay.
Here is a poem I wrote at the time.











THE COCKLE-GATHERERS

We found them difficult
to love, despised
their foreignness
and could discover
in those bland,
concealing faces,
no vestige of ourselves.

Their exile presence here
was deemed invasive.
We shared with them
no culture,
no common aim.

Their language
set them apart; built a great wall
between us, their so-reluctant hosts
and them, the strangers,
hungry to seize
those beastly jobs
no native beast would do.

To destitution, famished dreams,
into the grasp of greedy men,
in numbers, unrecorded,
they came regardless,
fleeing, in a hostile land,
without a single English phrase,
a past beyond imagining.

There on a northern, winter shore
suddenly,
in language universal,
their frightened voices
spoke to all the mongrel souls of men
spawned from a common source.

The tide
of panic rising
with the sudden water;
the hopeless cries;
cold darkness
sucking life away.