Revolution of the Seasons

work
Work by Ford Madox-Brown

Revolution of the Seasons

May Day – the start of the long, late Spring,
When early promise at last bears shoots,
And the frigid world of the Winter King
Is losing, day-by-day, its sting,
As underground, our creeping roots
Are undermining everything.

The dawns are dawning early,
And the dark is in retreat –
A wind of change is blowing,
And to some it’s blowing sweet.
The world is waking, waking,
To the march of springing feet.

Labor Day, when the Summer turns cold,
And all that promise, though showy, is fruitless –
Or just as our efforts are harvesting gold,
So they all dry up and lose their hold –
As footings, once secure, prove rootless,
Infiltrated by bugs and mould.

The dusk is gaining daily,
And the storms are in the skies,
While the chill is on the breeze
And the breeze is on the rise,
And the world is sleeping, sleeping,
As the hoar-frosts crystallise.

Real Ladies Prefer Cubic Zirconium

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Real Ladies Prefer Cubic Zirconium

Diamond – as hard as the universe –
A nebula trapped under ice.
Forged in the heart of a supernova,
Polished by continents tumbleing over.

Diamond – as hard as a warlord’s curse –
Each sparkle a bullet, the price.
Landscapes are pillaged for so little won –
Carbon for carbon, a thousand to one.

I suppose the pecksniffs will insist that zirconium can only refer to the elemental metal, and that the crystaline form of the dioxide should be referred to as cubic zirconia – but since I never listen to pecksniffs I can’t be sure.

Sunday Best

hats to heaven

Sunday Best

Just what is it with trilbies and churches ?
Men must remove theirs, but women’s stay put.
Indeed, why does Paul say that women must cover ?
Is God so upset by each bare-headed mother ?
Men, shed your turbans !  Your masking besmirches !
At least He allows still a shoe on each foot !
(Though women are free from such moaning and wails
To sport wedding bonnets and funeral veils.)

Just what is it with stetsons and churches ?
We might as well dress-down in sackcloth and soots
Than decked-out in finery, mumbling our prayers,
While tutting at any bloke hiding his hairs.
Men, lose your skull-caps !  Such hattery lurches
To thinking you’re working upon your kibbutz –
For men who wear hats are not resters, but grafters –
So the Lord wants your locks flowing free to the rafters.

Just what is it with bowlers and churches ?
Men’s heads are open, but women’s are shut.
How much of an insult is headgear undoffed ?
Does God rage in Heaven at brims left aloft ?
Men, ditch your toupees !  Our scriptural researches
Show bald-pate Elisha is nobody’s butt !
Or do we use ‘etiquette’ as a hypocrisy ?
That doesn’t sound like good manners to me !

I hope the hatted women in church also keep silent throughout, just as 1st Cor 14:34 says to.

Horseguards

royal guard standing near lamp post
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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.

The Noble Art of Treachery

two white and black chess knights facing each other on chess board
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The Noble Art of Treachery

To defeat one’s mortal enemy,
Approach him as a friend
And speak the honeyed words of peace
And fawn and twist and bend.
In time, once his guard is down
And slower to defend,
Then draw him even closer still
With bridges on the mend.

Confuse with favoured trading rights,
And treaties by the tome,
And offer cunning compromise
Beneath his pleasure dome
By breaking bread instead of bones,
And quoting “when in Rome…”,
And beating ploughshares from your swords
To bring his harvest home.

And waiting for the trap to spring,
He will not understand
You sprung it years ago, back when
You shook him by the hand –
And now he’s caged by friendship
With no anger to command,
As your lovers take his city
And your children work his land.

But best of all, he cannot strike you back,
He is too late –
For now his precious kin are settled
All throughout your state –
For he has also conquered
When he opened up his gate,
And now can only sit and watch
His people grow-up great.

Free-Zoning

zoners still believe this

Free-Zoning

We don’t need Miscavige, see,
To run our audits, rig our fates –
We’re moving up the bridge all by ourselves.
We needn’t wait till OT3
To learn of Xenu’s DC-8s,
Now Teegeeack’s escaped your secret shelves.

We’re the methadone to their crack,
The thirteenth sign to their zodiac,
With a finger-wag to psychiatry,
And a less-homophobic piety –
We’re still in the zone, but at least the zone is free.

We’ve shed your cult, we’ve sunk your navy,
Quit your billion-years a slave,
Although we all think LRH is swell.
Yet still the core is true, unbeaten –
Still believe in body thetans,
Just like Quakers still believe in Hell.

With solar-powered e-psych probes,
We’re the white-shirt face to their cult-black robes,
Lightly tutting at SPs,
But never disconnection, please !
We’re an altogether healthier paranoia, with no fees.

The High Cost of Living

why isn't it on the bumper

The High Cost of Living

Diesel-hungry four-by-fours,
Draft-dodgers dodging wars,
Betting on the football scores –
Well, that’s the price of freedom.

Christmas Cards on sale in June,
TV news all afternoon,
And folks who claim we faked the Moon –
Cos that’s the price of freedom.

Despots have it easy,
They can do away with clutter –
But me, I’ll take the messiness
Of ev’ry geek and nutter.
So tune them in or tune them out,
But never for a second doubt
That we can ever do without.

Sticky kids on talent shows,
Tattooed arm and studded nose,
Neighbours’ hedges come to blows,
And that’s the price of freedom.

Metric units here and there,
And lots of artificial hair –
It isn’t always right and fair,
But that’s the price of freedom.

Dreamers have it easy,
They can make the world anew –
But me, I’ll take the old one
Cos it’s here and now and true.
So make it sweat or make it blink,
But never for a second think
That freedom is just pen and ink.

The Uncarved Block

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The Uncarved Block

Ancient wisdom always seems
To favour pure and nat’ral artefacts,
The stuff of philosophic dreams
Of unmined hills and untapped cataracts –
Yet crying for such simple ways
From modern lives of iron, wells and mills,
They lounge and think away their days,
While harder-working peers must hone their skills
To hew and dig and chop and grind,
And turn the world into a workshop floor –
To build the surplus so a mind
Has food enough to ponder nat’ral lore.

Big Charters

plaque

Big Charters

Thirteen copies were written, at least,
And probably many more –
All passed from bishop to sheriff to lord,
And pinned-up, read, and, finally, stored,
Then rotted or burned or thoroughly creased,
Until we were left with four.

But then, for many centuries,
Their words were out-of-date –
Their scutages and fishing-weirs
Belonged to long-forgotten years,
And busy parli’mentaries
Have moved on the debate.

Their Latin text is cramped and clipped,
With not an inch to spare.
And just like half the baron knights,
We cannot even read the rights
We’re gifted by this foreign script –
We have to trust they’re there.

But so what if the parchments fade ?
They’re passing, mortal things –
It ain’t the laws that they imparted,
But the movement that they started –
In their image we are made,
Who bow to laws, not kings.

Clause 50

magna

Clause 50

“We will remove entirely the kinsmen of Gerard d’Athée from their bailiwicks, so that in future they may hold no bailiwick in England.  We will remove from the kingdom all foreign knights who have come to the detriment of the kingdom.”

Magna Carta, 1215

English rights for English barons:
That was the cry at liberty’s birth –
And though they’d gag at the thought, would the barons,
Their rights would trickle down to the serfs.
Slowly, slowly, and bloody hard-won,
Till the days of the tyrant-kings were done.

But nothing but exile for Gerard d’Athée,
Farewell to Engelard, can’t let you stay,
Goodbye to Guy, and to Guy, too-da-loo,
Au revoir, Peter, and Andrew, adieu,
And Geoffrey and Geoffrey, you’re fate is the same:
Deported by charter in liberty’s name.
And Philip (and brothers), return to your sires,
Ex-Sheriff of Derby- and Nottingham- shires.

So there it was: the English disease:
Scraping-up some scapegoats for their sleeping in our bed.
But never for a moment did we get up off our knees
To kick out at the barons – so we kicked the French instead.
This lack of disquiet from locals is telling:
Just tugging at forelocks instead of rebelling.

But surely things have improved ?
It isn’t as though the world hasn’t moved:
It started a wave that has kept rolling on,
So we’ve far more rights now than had even King John.
But all the un-English may find us less caring,
For English-born freedoms were not made for sharing.
So tell, Magna Carta: just what are you for ?,
But a thing to suspend when we’re neck-deep in war.

Note that in the original, the clauses were not numbered.  The first to do so was George Ferrers’ English translation of 1534, while the modern numbering dates from William Blackstone in 1759.