As full as they had
Mathura Umachandran, UK
15 January 2021
‘Jones prosecuting told the court,
Inside … does not bear thinking about’.
But thirty nine had to bear the sweating dark,
sealed up with their goodbyes.
Logistics is the business of squeezing space and eyes shut:
The world is split between
those who can afford not to think about inside
And those who are thinged upon entry.
The coroner quoted Gladstone
measuring out the tender mercies of a people
by how they care for their dead
Such mathematical exactitude might be found wanting
When there is no more space
to stuff life exchanged as goods.
The Guardian UK reported: [t]hirty-nine Vietnamese migrants suffocated as they were transported across the Channel, enduring unbearable temperatures sealed in pitch darkness inside an airtight container for almost 12 hours.[1] The criminals accused of organising the transportation of 39 Vietnamese people may have squeezed two loads of human cargo into one lorry, out of a greedy desire to secure the £10,000 a head payment from each passenger. … A lorry driver who allegedly took the victims across the continent to Zeebrugge in Belgium, where the trailer was unhooked and loaded on to a cargo ship headed for Purfleet [Essex][2].
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/07/essex-lorry-deaths-39-vietnamese-migrants-suffocated-in-container-court-hears
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/09/essex-lorry-deaths-vietnamese-migrants-called-relatives-while-suffocating-court-hears