My Learned Friend

July 29, 2009 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Poems and tagged: idiot barristers

I heard an old duck puff

about the fact that young lawyers don’t know enough

The class generation Y, as a type

Hadn’t opened a book in their life

and if pressed upon in Court

they wasted time and educed costs

the whole system was a rort

it should be the case

that only generation end

was responsible for submitting and sending

transmissions and spending

clients money and fending

counterclaims in the courts

in their suits with their gray hair

and their imperious air while

the juniors would age but stay off the stage

with their noses in pcs

and their hands between their knees.

 

When I heard this old duck puff

I was sipping a coffee

But I stopped and I laughed

thinking of seven years spent

in a class with head bent

nose to a desk and a HECS debt that

he spent on the first house he had bought.

I thought how when he got his degree

University was free and

the economy was strong

and solicitors were trained

At length and no wrong

ever escaped the supervisory eye

of the partner to whom they were tied.

And I wanted to say to that graying old duck

When you were a buck did you give a fuck

about your p’s and your q’s

your honours and if it pleases, please dos

or were you like gen Y

with blood hot in your veins

And a restless energy in spades

Yet denying the very things that you want to do

Owning homes, finding wives,

Building savings, getting steak knives,

So you can stand in a court

and watch people be bartered and bought

for the sake of some rules

contained in a book

thrown back from a time

when a woman like me

wouldn’t stand in this suit, for hours at a time.

 

Who were you then when

the last generation’s end

queried your sense and in a motion dismissed

all the work that you did

to be a part of this shit?

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