I am ashamed of the way my country, the United Kingdom, treats refugees. To me, how we treat people who have lost everything except their lives is a measure of the kind of country that we are.

Except, I don’t think that the hostile attitude of our current government reflects the reaction of the people who live here. People I know have put enormous effort into helping refugees arriving here from the Ukraine. I’d like to think that most people, faced with someone whose only option is to flee their homeland, would do whatever they can to help them.

The problem sometimes is to get past the dog-whistle rhetoric that our government uses to divide us, so I was delighted to find a poem that does just that.

I’ve been reading Brian Bilston’s poetry anthology, ‘Days Like These‘ in which he gives a poem for every day.

13th January was Michael Bond’s birthday which prompted Brian Bilston to offer his poem ‘Please Bear In Mind‘.

At first glance, this looks like a lighthearted smile of a poem. But I think the smile it provokes is the blade Bilston uses to thrust his idea of justice into the heart of this issue. Read this and see what you think.