The Populists

And now: rousing music.

A cadre of recruits sing

‘Oh, to be in England!’

as if not already there.

Tiresome rhetorics

speak on our behalf,

sustained by violins –

cadenzas swell to embrace

dawn over the shires

with audible relief tones –

though something always

keeping out of reach.

"And so let us receive blame,

each according to our tribe,

and may those exonerated

forever receive beatitude

each according to their preferences:

mown lawns, canal banks, lupins,

share dividends, King Edwards,

warm dark ale.

"But let those be cursed

who substitute

stern oaks,

lakes, lochs,

thatch, ketch,

for that which

fetches us now

(carpark,

hypermarket,

slip road,

universal

consumer

experience).

"Out, damn’d modernisers, globalists.

Let there be no illusion.

Let there be no allusion –

least of all to

philology,

philosophy,

foreign accents …"

Allow us our own miseries

in bleak, windswept patches.

Definitions of a crisis

Swim out now into that blue/azure sea,

you're either a tourist or a refugee –

where you were born is everything

or nothing if you happened to be born

in places where such things don’t matter.

I have a passport: it’s changing colour

even as we speak. And the headlines bark

like stray dogs, like rabid warnings

of what we’re expected to believe –

and the easy allocations of blame.

Somewhere over the city clouds form,

but the mountain adopts autumnal promise –

completely out of season –

which is what this man crossing the road dismisses.

March 2020