February 2024

In memory of George Floyd, killed in police custody on the streets of Minneapolis 25 May 2020

 

The Angels of America have spoken

In Houston, LA and Hoboken.

And this is what they said:

 

“We can’t breathe.

We came here to help, to give you some space

But now we can’t breathe — there’s no air in this place.

You’re fighting corona, hence masks on the face

But far worse than that is a virus called ‘race’

(Exported from Europe in every case.)

Weeks of lockdown have brought many tears

But our nation’s been bleeding for 400 years.

 

What’s crushing our chests are the stones of foundation

We’re choking to death on the sins of the nation.

Look at the founding of the ‘Land of the Free’ —

Try saying that to the Sioux or Cherokee.

The pattern continues with black lives destroyed —

Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, George Floyd.

Or a million slaves in the hold of a ship

Ripped from their homes on a hellish trip

To labour and toil with their dignity stripped,

Under the lash of the first slaver, a Brit.

Far, far from love.

Where was God, in the Heavens above?

 

What wicked trade, what evil in flood!

Most nations were founded in conquest and blood.

Genocide, slavery, plunder and gold,

Not a great start for a nation not old.

 

We’ve knelt on the neck of a nation of tribes

Who we’ve slaughtered, corrupted, swindled and bribed.

From soaring plains where the buffalo roamed

We’ve taken their culture, their spirit, their home.

(And in so doing did the same to our own.)

 

We’ve poisoned the rivers and fouled the air,

We’ve worshipped money and laid the earth bare.

We’ve made a God of the unholy dollar

Now it’s gripping our throat like an iron collar.

We’ve knelt on the neck of a million slaves

We’ve feasted like kings on a million graves.

From where we sit, it’s plain to see —

We buried our hearts at Wounded Knee.

 

We come with a message, and our message is this:

There is a way back, a return to our bliss.

And we come here to help, not to judge you ill;

Heaven above sees the Good in us still.

But first we must heal the cruel and the wrong

To unite a nation where all men belong.

 

We can’t turn back the clock or undo what’s been done

But we can acknowledge our wrongs, one by one.

We must open our hearts and look deep within

To root out the bias, the hate and the sin.

 

You can pass all the motions, enact all the laws

Sign all the statutes, seal all the doors.

Announce the change with fancy parades.

But without kindness and love it’s just a charade.

 

America! America!

 

Cross the Colorado, the Platte and the Potomac.

Scale the Rockies and the Adirondacks,

Soar above the grasses of the Great Plains,

Dance in Alabama’s rains.

Greet California’s golden sun.

And as a people, bind ye together as one.

 

Let’s open our wings, take a knee, bow the head.

In returning to kindness to God we’ll be led.

 

Open hearts, touch spirit, feed the soul.

Let all nations heal and be whole.

 

We are the Angels of America, from Houston to LA to Hoboken.

And we have spoken.”

 

The ice sheets are melting

The climate’s outa control.

Shade is at a premium.

The weather’s on a roll.

 

Kids in India are dying

But that’s a long way away.

And half of Canada is ashes.

I never went there anyway.

 

There’s a heat dome over Texas

The cowboys sweat like hogs

Yet still they drill for oil

As Houston sits in smog.

 

As our planet goes to shit

Who gives a flying f*ck?

Just have another San Miguel

And turn the aircon up.

 

Road trips now are better

The wipers are rarely on.

Windscreens stay clean and clear —

The bugs are dead and gone.

 

The hippies got it right

They knew it all along.

Peace and love and lots of sex,

Acid, weed and song.

 

Leaders don’t give a damn

Warnings they didn’t heed.

They’re in another’s pocket

Victims of corporate greed.

 

Searching for the cause of this

Is not exactly funny.

It all comes down to just one thing:

And that’s the love of money.

 

Money is an invented thing

I’m sure you will agree.

It puts a price on everything

So nothing is for free.

 

There are some things that should be free

I think that’s only fair.

Specifically I’m thinking of

Water, soil and air.

 

Yet wonga spoils us all.

It messes with our head.

There’s value for us in a tree

Only when it’s dead.

 

Let us in the rivers swim;

That’ll make us strong and fit.

But the water companies’ overflows

Mean we swim in shit.

 

What to do, my kindred soul,

With famine, fire and flood?

How might we now proceed

When land is turned to mud?

And heatwaves boil our blood?

 

As our planet goes to shit

Who gives a flying f*ck?

Just have another San Miguel

And turn the aircon up.

 

We could turn to the indigents,

The tribes that surely know

How to live in harmony

And harvest, reap and sow?

 

So let us to the forest go

Their wisdom us to tell.

Oh sorry, I plain forgot:

We blew them all to hell.

 

We can still watch a TV show

On which we feast and binge

As the sewage laps our ankles

And the door comes off its hinge.

 

As our planet goes to shit

Who gives a flying f*ck?

Just have another San Miguel

And turn the aircon up.

 

The End

Beware delusions of grandeur

When you strive towards your goal

Making loads and loads of money

As the Devil buys your soul.

 

You may achieve great things

In this fleeting, temporal life.

You may create big buildings

And land a trophy wife.

 

They may even erect a statue

For you, and you alone,

Showing, of course, your best side

In marble, glass or stone.

 

After all, ‘you have a reputation to maintain’

Even when you’re dead.

But you’ll always have a pigeon

S(h)itting* on your head.

 

* If you’re sensibilities are offended, treat the ‘h’ as silent

Above the boggy fields of northern France,

Above the clash of club and sword and lance

Of splint’ring shields and fearful faces smashed

As helmets split and bloody brains are dashed,

Of giant steeds impaled on pointed stakes

To howls and cries only the dying make.

Above all this, loosed from the archer’s grip,

With shaft of ash and heron feathers fletched

With nock of horn and tipped with iron barb

Through the skies the swift and silent arrow flies.

It speeds to the top of its deadly arc

And, like a bird, its feathers trim its flight

Before it dips its head for the descent.

It hurtles now at terrifying speed

Towards the human slaughter far below.

Unleashed, no man or God may stop it now.

No soul escapes its lethal bodkin point.

For now it joins its brothers in the skies

A hail of spikes upon the French condemned

To fly untamed and pierce chivalric hearts,

To nail horse and knight in the earth and blood.

The flower of France trampled in the mud.

Across the sea by English yeomen honed

The longbow robs the gallant French of breath

Despatching — without warning — instant death.

At battle’s end, the fighting all but done

(As robbers pick and loot the still warm dead)

The King ascends a mound of fallen knights

The royal sword in triumph raised aloft,

In English fires by English smithies forged,

His loyal men beneath him roar,

“For Harry, England and Saint George!”

At the foot of an olive tree

In the garden of Gethsemane,

My son weeps.

 

He fears the hurt and the loss,

The Roman scourge, the bloody cross.

Yet his tears fall in sorrow, too:

For Man.

 

When the Prince of Lies slithered into the First Garden,

He laced two hearts with greed and lust,

Turning forests into whores

And pastures into dust.

 

Satan didn’t dispense ignorance or hate:

He dispensed separation,

Then let it do its work.

He split hearts into ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘yours’ and ‘mine’.

He made you forget you’re human and divine.

He tricked you from the path, led you astray;

And day by day

Step by step, you lost your way.

 

Even my son — in his agony — has forgotten.

Through his moonlit tears he seeks me in the heavens.

Of course, I am there, beyond the stars,

And in every twig that snaps beneath his feet.

This has been forgotten.

 

There is nowhere I am not.

There is nothing made that I have not made.

I am in all things.

I am in all.

I am All.

 

Amen.

A lament for her rape and murder after she was abducted 500m from my home, near Clapham Common, South-west London, March 2021

~~~

My heart is woeful sore, for the woman

We did not know but all adore

Who suddenly appeared on lamp-post, screen and door.

Your pretty face, alert and full of life

Now as still as a knife

In a dusty drawer.

 

You were the best of us

Taken by the worst of us.

 

You are no longer

You are no longer here

You are no longer here or there.

You are everywhere.

 

You are the tracks of our grieving tears

You are the lilac sky as sunset nears

Cloaking the Common in the gath’ring dark

On your last walk home through the quiet park.

The bandstand you passed with your final steps

Will never be the same again:

A floral grandstand now, a bird of paradise

Soaring to all points North, South, East and West.

But I guess you did that all the time,

Didn’t you? Everything you touched, you blessed.

 

We’ll be seeing you, supernova Sarah,

Playing among the stars

Tugging on Orion’s Belt and skipping onto Mars.

 

And as your universal journey starts

May your smile live eternal in our hearts.

 

 

Rest in peace, Sarah

Stood stock still at the cross-roads in the park

Frank at my heels

Morning sunlight bathes my back

Washes through me,

Warming.

 

People come and go

Some fast, some slow.

Most lost in thought or screen

Brows furrowed,

Man and dog unseen.

But some do smile

As they scuttle past.

 

I gaze for long down the railway path.

Figures loom towards us, pass by

And are gone.

Others recede and shrink, absorbed by the mottled green

To another, distant scene.

A robin, breast a-glow, flits pasts us.

Curious or playful? Hard to know.

 

Light and shade jostle on the dry, beaten earth

Dappling the ground with green, grey and brown

Shape shifting, never in repose,

As the sunlight dances, ebbs and flows.

 

Let’s loosen the bands that bind

Slip the knots, the tangles uncurled.

Let our feet stand soft upon the ground

And become one with the dusty world.

When it was all over and the Earth was dead

God spoke to us

And this is what He said:

“The hippies were right all along.

You should have heeded their beautiful song,

Carried to you on the wings of a dove:

‘Peace and Love, man, Peace and Love’ ”.

Amen