Cross-posting: The Workhouse Howl

This first appeared on my main blog in this post.

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Some time ago, after watching an episode of the UK TV series "Call the Midwife" which dealt with - in part - one of the aftereffects of the appalling workhouses that existed in the UK for centuries known as the "workhouse howl", a terrible howl that inmates and former inmates would make, seemingly involuntarily I wrote a poem about that, which is copied in below. Oddly (well, it seems odd to me), that has been the most viewed poem on my creativity blog.

However, I am increasingly of the view that our societies are increasingly doing more and more the same to people - aided and abetted by managers and supervisors who keep saying "we have to make sacrifices, we have to be competitive, we have to work unpaid overtime, etc" - all of which is, on the larger scale, a self fulfilling prophecy. Workers have taken a first step on the hamster wheel of selling their souls to the profits of a few, and keep doing so in order to avoid falling on the ever-faster wheel. (Managers even make it worse by perverting spiritual techniques such as mindfulness, and ignoring evidence.) As a result, many are psychologically screaming their own "workhouse howl".


There is an antidote to this: slow down, simplify, and think before you act (including thinking before trying this suggested antidotes - for instance, if you have dependents, as I do, you may have to defer these actions for a few years).

Now, my poem, The Workhouse Howl.

Man’s inhumanity

to mankind

is well known

in war

and strife

and bloody dictatorship:

but what are we

to make of

a place

a time

a culture

that thinks the poor

or unemployed

are merely lazy

- there’s jobs out there

if they really want them

and then

to prove its point

compounds

the error

future tho’ it be to them

of concentration camps
for women and children
in places and climes
far to the south

by building prisons

for the poor

and

in backward echo

of "work will make you free"

calls them

workhouses.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2012 I undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit, of course :)