Horseguards
Come on down to Whitehall,
To visit England’s pride –
Fine-dressed guards on horseback stand
Sentry either side.
Come on down to Whitehall,
These soldiers trained to kill
With milit’ry precision sit
Absolutely still.
Come on down to Whitehall,
At eleventh hour
Watch crack troops all moving at
The rate of one horse-power.
Come on down to Whitehall,
They don’t do things by halves –
Our household guards can both stand guard
And pose for photographs.
Blown on the Windrush
Oh London, my London ! Forever so fond,
Yet I heard of the rumours of places beyond –
For further than ring roads and suburban stations
Apparently lies there a wealth of far nations.
How greatly I dreamed of the boat and the train
And the tropical sun, now washed out by your rain.
For my riches are poorly, my cupboards are bare,
My travelling stalled upon your thoroughfare.
Oh London, my London ! You felt my distress.
And pitied my yearnings to quit your address.
For penned by your broadways, I longed to escape –
So you widened my cage from the Steppes to the Cape,
From Hong Kong to Lisbon, from Cairo to Cork,
From L.A. to Delhi, from Auckland to York.
With bright lights and glamours, and chiming Bow Bell,
You brought me the world, and their families as well !
Growing up in the boring countryside, I’ve always liked the idea of immigration – not for myself, far too lazy, but for the rest of the world to do the hard work of coming to me. Though I guess I am a kind-of immigrant into London, and this was written soon after my arrival as I was still marvelling. Looking back, it’s a bit dum-de-dum, but that pretty much summed-up my provincial output at the time. What my poems needed was a splash of colour, and London was just the place for that.
Dressed in the Raiments of Emperors
Oh People of Coventry, turn not away !
For not only Thomas should view this display.
Oh People of Coventry, look not in shame,
She canters so proudly, erect in her frame.
Oh People of Coventry, unshield your eyes !
She wants us to watch her, to join her, to rise.
Oh People of Coventry, protest exudes,
So cast off your shackles, your breeches, your prudes.
The story is based on a real woman – Godgifu, Countess of Mercia, who survived her husband Leofric and died soon before the Domesday survey of 1086 (which lists her former lands). The bareback ride doesn’t appear until the Flores Historiarum collected and retold by Roger of Wendover in the early HE 11200s (early 1200s AD), and Peeping Tom didn’t get a look-in until 11600-700s.
As for the poem, I wrote this so long ago that it feels almost as old as the legend. Strange I was trying to channel socialist values through a protest over lower taxes !
Carcassong
Highwaymen are looting on the roads beneath the Pyranees,
As abbots tend their gardens in the misty Marin breeze,
While knights are walled in cities with their castles, shields and shrines,
And farmers lie in fields while the sunshine grows the vines.
And the River Aude is rolling down
From mountain pass to coastal town,
And from the peaks we see for miles
The chequerboard of tiles.
It turns out, the highwaymen in the opening line were all working for Lucky Hans, busy swiping other people’s property. However, I hear there is a growing resistance movement aiming to Free The Meeple !
Tumbleweed
If you want a Russian Thistle,
All you have to do is whistle –
In they tumble on the breeze.
An 1880s stowaway,
A foreign sprout who’s here to stay
By blowing ever West with ease.
Not a thistle, but as hairy,
From the steppes to claim the prairie,
Infiltrating cowboy lore.
Full of thorns and full of seeds,
These drifting immigrants are weeds
Just made to be a metaphor.
The first recording of a Russian Thistle in America is from 1877 in South Dakota, but ‘seven’ has too many syllables…
Stone-Sand
Shingle beaches, pebble-dashed,
Where armoured dunes are heaped and smashed
By hefting surf that tills and rolls
On up the beaches, spits and shoals,
Whatever flints that storm and time can prize
And toss like bowls –
All layered out by weight and size.
Gravels from the cliffs and beds
In blacks and greys, in blues and reds –
These bucket-breakers of the strand,
These castles that can never stand,
Upon a beach-head built by wave on wave
Of new-formed land,
Of nuggets dug from out the grave.
Pushing back against our soles,
The sucking wash between its holes –
This is no barefoot summer beach,
But haunt of limpet, kelp and leech.
Yet stones to scree to grains shall grow
Along this tidal reach
By silicates just going with the flow.
Coasts
The Spanish have the Brava and Del Sol,
The French have the Vermeille and d’Azur,
The British have…the South, the East and West –
They’re simply places for the trains to roll.
They sound so innocent and amateur,
Before the marketeers have had them dressed.
They gave us the Jurassic, don’t forget.
What next ? The Coccolith Coast of Dover ?
The Devonian Coast of…I don’t know…Dundee ?
The Windfarm Coast of Wales – it could be yet,
The Yorkshire Bladderwracks – think it over,
The Seaside Coast of Seaton-by-the-Sea…
The Name of the Wind
Siroccos blow across the Sahara,
North from the desert to the inland sea,
Where Mistrals meet them, off the Alps,
To buffet the coasts of France and Italy.
The Helm roars in from Winter Norway,
And the Bora from the Steppes out East,
But most of all, from gale to zephyr,
None can blow as often as the beast –
From out the West, with not a name but Westerly,
He comes, and comes, and rarely drops for long.
He’s blowing turbines, hats and weathervanes,
From Summer-teasing soft to stormy-strong –
Bringing the Atlantic in his clouds,
And laden schooners in his wake,
From Kerry landfall to the Humber,
He’s the one for whom the branches shake.
In truth, we rarely name our winds in Britain,
Save to tell us where they’ve been –
And Westerlies are born on ocean-blue,
In cloudy-grey, to keep our island green.
Rue Britannia
The trouble with lefties is cultural cringe –
The feeling that England and Englishness
Are suspect, colonial, Tory in dress,
And bearing the taint of the hooligan fringe.
I swear, that there’s many a comrade I know
Who just longs for our country to go down the gutter –
So while we’re all queuing for teabags and butter,
At least they can tell us they so told us so…
We know all the customs, yet scarcely believe them,
We laugh at the toffs and the pomp and regalia,
Meet with them rarely, yet long for their failure –
We just see the wigs, not the justice beneath them.
However we came here, we’re on the same side,
So don’t be ashamed of the marks that distinguish –
We’re caring, and hopeful, and diverse, and English !
For aren’t we the ones who are all about Pride ?
And St George’s banner – why must we destroy it ?
Let’s demystify it, but love the old flag.
So wave it, or don’t – but it’s only a rag –
It’s not gonna kills us if others enjoy it.
And yes, it is shame about God Save the Queen
With its sentiments we’re ill-at-ease to endorse –
But with national anthems, that’s par for the course –
It hardly excuses our virtuous spleen.
Ignore all the words, and just hum to the tune –
A dirgy tune, sure, but the one that we’ve got.
And at least we all know it – let’s give it a shot,
It’s only a minute, it’s all over soon.
There’s bad in our past, but those times were withstood –
Let’s learn from our worst-selves, and never forget,
And sing out our best side, and build on it yet –
The odd bit of bunting might do us some good –
Don’t think that old England is not worth the fuss,
For we’re all a big part of the way she turns out –
Let’s change her for better, not whimper and pout !
Be proud of our nation, for this land is us !
Why did those Feet…?
I’ve often found it fairly odd,
The way the English always had
To borrow someone else’s god,
And rush to join the latest fad –
From Mother Earth to Father Woden,
Merlin and Sir Galahad,
Until at last, through constant goading,
So we fell for Jesus, bad !
But what was the attraction
In a bunch of desert-nomad tales ?
The sarabands that blew their action
Don’t translate to English gales –
I guess we want to get along –
A thousand martyrs can’t be wrong !
When cult’ral cringe is at its height,
The chariots are burning bright !
So Adam loves his country Garden
(Never naked, always blond),
But once he’s out, why would he harden
In a world so green beyond ?
And Noah’s rain is not a threat
To those who never felt a thirst,
And Moses needn’t raise a sweat
When native plagues of gnats are worse !
And Jesus, what about the lad ?
Politely yet at-length ignored,
Where nobody would call him mad,
Yet nobody would call him Lord.
“He’s far too foreign”, they would say,
“And far too showy – not our way.”
Yet somehow (why, though, isn’t clear)
Jerusalem was builded here.
Rhyming Couplets 