Refugee Blues
Two tickets to Happiness
Explain how animals and nature are set against human cruelty, and how the poem uses irony.
They go to a committee for help. It offers them a chair, and asks them politely to come back next year. At a public meeting, a speaker says that if they let refugees in, they will steal our daily bread.
They hear what sounds like thunder in the sky: it is Hitler, over Europe, saying 'they must die'. They know he means them.
All around, animals are better off. A poodle in a jacket and a cat let in through an open door are cared for. Fish swim freely in the harbour. Birds sing in the trees: they have no politicians. But none of them are German Jews.
In a dream, they see a building with a thousand floors and a thousand windows and doors: not one of them is theirs. They ask for two tickets to Happiness; but every coach is full.
The poem ends on a snowy plain, where ten thousand soldiers march to and fro, looking for them.
Even pets and birds have more freedom than these people.
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