David Heavenor: Music

A song which could be about any number of dictatorships but I always think on that sinister image of Augusto Pinochet in dark glasses sitting with his arms crossed defiantly with his cohorts in the death junta standing behind him after the coup d'etat in Chile in 1973. Meanwhile plans for The Caravan of Death were being hatched to stalk and murder his left wing opponents.

National Figures


Gather up my belongings
leave them by the door
Then send them all to my dear mother
praying on the shore

Hold high your national figures
They'll make you pull the trigger on your neighbours
When hate stalks the halls of politics
More bodies float up in the mix down by the harbour
'Come, come' I hear them say
'Some bum disappears every day, do me a favour'

Portraits hang from marble stairs
To landings leading everywhere
except to love and truth and justice
A bloated finger flicks
lean bodies hang in crucifix
And echo limbs caught in the sway of the Madonna's kiss
Black trucks slip from back street halls
Mothers press pictures of sons to walls and posts and blistered railings

So when will you want me?
When will you see me?
When will you wait outside my door?
When will you need me
To stay alive for so much more

A black sea curls round your shores
A black sea seeps through your pores
It's going to rise up in thee