"We will not repeat that..."

For this week’s exercise, we took the title of this post- from a conversation about past exercises- as our prompt. Here’s what I churned out in 10 minutes flat.

A factory in China

In the middle of spring

Working for designers

Making dresses and things

Conditions like a prison

Workers handling the vests

Burning with the friction

For the demands of the west

A closed-off room

Electrics badly placed

A tragedy is waiting

A disaster they will face

A machine overheats

When a room is closed off

The flames hit the sheets

above a forty-foot drop

the factory, the company

and the people are burned

Is this what has to happen

Before we all learn?

Yet in England there’s a shower

And the people take cover

In the high street clothes shop

Charging lower than any other.

Hmm. A few issues. I did this under pressure, spending the first five minutes thinking what the fuck do I write for this? Then this news story came to mind  (an incident which actually occurred in Bangladesh, not China). I also ran out of time and didn’t get a chance to properly contrast rainy, freezing England with scorched and arid Bangladesh (or China).

Furthermore, I wanted to tie the poem to the title prompt: “We will not repeat that”. Tragically, it has taken a disaster like this for Bangladesh to commit to improving their health and safety record. Here’s hoping that the country will work towards implementing safety measures to stop deadly incidents such as these from occurring.