Lies

Yesterday, liars spoke,
and we believed what we believed.

Hearing only half the truth,
we took the grains of it, fragments,
perjured words, disintegrated sense,
and remade the telling.

Now we cannot reconstruct any truth
from its pieces: too many omissions,
too much unsaid in the gaps between
the lines of the convoluted speeches
and cobbled together statements
of our betters.

Today’s lies are coarse
as a wind-blown dust
that smothers honest thought
in overblown platitudes.

Obfuscation, misdirection,
fantasy and falsehood pour down
from those we now know only too well
as no better than the worst of us.

© BH, 2022

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With the present state of governance (abysmal) and the Scottish constitutional question still in the air, I feel all too acutely, the atmosphere of propaganda and spin turning toward untruth and mendacity. Now we’re faced with politicians and the powerful in a cabal that will say anything to hold on to position and privilege.

If, once, we could tease out the merest fact from the heap of half-truths, now we are buried under a chaff of lies. What we can see clearly, though, is that those doing the lying have neither honour or distinction. They are the lowest of the low.