SBS Poetry Anthology

Staff in SBS have been asked to write a poetry anthology for those taking redundancy, to be given to them as a memory of their time at University of Salford. That is, as a memory of their friends and colleagues here. We thought it would be nice to publish some of those poems here, so I will be trying to do that once a week over the next 3 weeks.

So here is our first poem, it's by Graham Taylor Cooke. Graham is the Programme Leader for CIPD Leadership and Management. It never fails to amaze me, that with so much expertise in management and leadership at the University it never seems to get drawn upon.

‘THE BUREAUCRATS’

Graham Taylor Cooke June 1997

(Some things never change)

They’re painting the house, they’re baking a pie,
They’re digging a hole and they don’t know why
The faceless beige people with the usual names
Plotting our course with their management games,
They write the procedures, they give us no quarter,
They’re...
The writer, the enforcer, and their blind supporters

Monitoring progress of things that don’t move,
Inflexible people in the processing groove
They’ll never falter in their quest to gain order,
And plot to discredit the ones on the border
And creative spirit is diluted with water,
By...
The writer, the enforcer, and their blind supporters

They’re bureaucratic, acrobatic people in beige,
Who jump through the hoops and work hard for their wage,
But when the great change comes, these beige bureaucrats
Will write more procedures whilst wearing two hats,
And they’ll slip unaware like lambs to the slaughter,
No more...
The writer, the enforcer, and their blind supporters